Nineteen years and counting in Papua New Guinea

Africa's bad example

The following arrived by email from Barry Lally with the question, 'Sound familiar?'

 

The dark underside of Chinese building boom 

Geoffrey York

Windhoek — From Tuesday's Globe and Mail, Wednesday, Jun. 24, 2009

There might be a global recession, but you wouldn't know it from a visit to Namibia's booming capital.
 
This former German colonial city in southwestern Africa, with its tidy streets and Bavarian architecture, is alive with construction activity. Cranes are towering over the city centre, many flying the distinctive red banner of China.
 
But Globe and Mail interviews in Namibia reveal a dark underside to the building boom: illegal labour practices by state-owned Chinese companies that dodge safety rules and pay their construction workers far below the minimum wage.
 
These labour violations have become widespread at Chinese companies across Africa, giving them an unfair advantage and allowing them to push their local competitors out of business, a new study says.
 
The study, funded by trade unions, alleges that the Chinese investment boom in Africa is fuelled by the exploitation of African workers. While many African leaders have welcomed the Chinese business invasion, the study documents a pattern of labour abuses across the continent, suggesting that Chinese investors are achieving their commercial successes on the back of cheap wages and violations of labour laws.
 
In Namibia, for example, the study found that every Chinese construction company was paying far less than minimum wage. In Malawi and Ghana, many employees of Chinese companies are required to work up to 12 hours without a break, sometimes for seven days a week. In Nigeria and Kenya, workers at some Chinese factories are locked inside their factories all day to prevent them from leaving, resulting in dozens of deaths when fires broke out.
 
“Chinese companies are particularly notorious in terms of the impunity with which they flout national labour laws, including health and safety standards,” the study said. “In some cases these companies receive the support of government agencies to violate labour regulations.”
Workers in the Namibian capital, Windhoek, confirmed that they face the threat of losing their jobs if they object to the Chinese violations of labour laws. “If we complain, they fire us,” one Namibian worker said in a Globe interview at a construction site where a Chinese company is building the Works and Transport Ministry headquarters.
 
The worker said the Chinese company is paying him the equivalent of 63 cents an hour. The minimum wage for entry-level construction workers in Namibia is about $1.27 an hour.
A visit to several Chinese construction sites in Windhoek found that many of the construction workers were not wearing safety helmets. Some said their Chinese employers required them to pay for their own safety equipment. They were charged more than $4 for a helmet, $1.40 for gloves and more than $11 for overalls – substantial sums of money in an African country. “It's not a nice place,” said another worker at the ministry construction site, who said he was trying to find a new job.
 
The 420-page study by the African Labour Research Network, based on two years of research, focuses on Chinese employers in 10 African countries, where Chinese trade and investment has soared dramatically in recent years. China is now Africa's biggest trading partner, and hundreds of Chinese companies have set up a major presence.
 
In the vast majority of cases, the study found, Chinese companies refuse to sign employment contracts with their workers, treating them as “casual workers” to deprive them of their legally required benefits. This led to routine 12-hour days, forced overtime without extra pay, the firing of female workers who became pregnant and other abuses.
“Workers knew that a refusal to work such long hours would lead to automatic dismissal,” the report said.
 
“In blatant violation of local labour laws, most Chinese companies denied African workers annual leave, sick leave, maternity leave and compassionate leave. … In Angola, many female workers at Chinese companies were unaware of their right to paid maternity leave and as a result worked until they gave birth and returned to work shortly afterwards.”
The “locking-in” of workers at Chinese factories was a “particularly grave” violation of their rights, the report said. At a Chinese factory in Malawi, the researchers had to talk to workers through a window because they were locked inside during their lunch break.
Violations of health and safety rules were equally serious. In Malawi, workers at a Chinese construction company had to mix cement with their bare hands. “Only very few Chinese employers provided their staff with protective clothing and equipment,” the study said.
“The toilets at most Chinese companies were found to be in a deplorable state and posed severe health risks for workers. In some cases, toilets were also used as change rooms and even ‘canteens' where workers ate from.”
 
Herbert Jauch, a researcher at the Labour Resource and Research Institute in Namibia and one of the authors of the study, said the Chinese companies were among the worst employers in almost every African country that the study looked at. “African workers are going back to the same horrific working conditions that their fathers suffered under colonial rule,” he said.
 
“Our message to China is, ‘Your rhetoric about a new partnership with Africa, not a new colonial master relationship, has to be matched by better labour standards.'“ African companies are finding it “virtually impossible” to compete with the Chinese companies, he said. “It's getting more and more difficult to survive. We've already seen some companies disappearing. They've set the spiral in motion, and it's becoming a dog-eat-dog industry.”

 

Welcome to the groundbreaking of Little Mindanao, Madang

After meetings and flip flops, apparently Gabriel Kapris won the day and got Governor Amet to concede to a PMIZ groundbreaking, which went off this morning. Without the general public. In fact, they turned PMV, after truck, after car, of people trying to get in to see the event, saying we needed permits, or personal invitations from RD Tuna. Our part included Kanage (Alphonse), who tried everything to raise the boom gate and get us in, but to no avail. We were turned around by everything from friendl security guards to idiot thugs. Just on the far side of the gate sat two Filipinos on motor scooters with arms crossed over their chests, chuckling... As apt a picture of the future of Madang as one could choreograph.

Below is an email I had sent around to Chamber of Commerce and general Madang business people, many of whom did try to come, but were, of course, turned away:

Those of you who either did not hear about or could not attend last Friday's meeting at Sir Peter Barter auditorium at DWU may not know that this was the final and only public toksave for Madang regarding the NFA and GoPNG 'Pacific Marine Industrial Zone' (or 'Marine Park' as it has been misleadingly referred to), and that there will be a groundbreaking ceremony with Sir Michael this Friday at Vidar Wharf.
>  
> On barely 217 hectares of State land at Vidar (Alexishafen, home to our best WWII tourism and local historical sites), leased-leased back by RD Tuna, we will soon be hosting up to ten tuna canneries, loineries and other industrial fishing entities from (mainly, judging from responses thus far) Japan and China, in the first Pacific industrial hub dedicated exclusively to reclaiming the profits from our tuna stocks. Whatever your opinion of the project (and I encourage you to check the NFA web site, as well as my own blog www.nancysullivan.typepad.com  for more info), this has certainly not been floated to the general public of Madang, which, by any account, lies directly in the impact zone of this 'development.'  Our tourism industry, our quiet charm and peaceful way of life are certainly major selling points in the project prospectus, and thus all of the businesses responsible for Madang's good name should have a say in an industrial development that will certainly impinge upon their future.
>  
> The only real beneficiary of this project is RD tuna, for whom the economies of scale will be extraordinary. The promise of 20,000 -40,000 more jobs is so fantastic to seem illusory, and where it can be trusted, suggests a level of settlement and infrastructure strain that would but the town of Madang to a dead halt. Consider the fact thast we have recently suffered from a month's delay in garbage disposal, and a spate of violence in response to MCC labour issues.
>  
> The PMIZ groundbreaking is scheduled for this Friday at Vidar Wharf. Try to be there. Governor Amet tried to halt the groundbreaking at last week's meeting, but evidently the Dept of Commerce and Industry are determined to ignore his request. Perhaps the general public can make their interests known on this public occasion.
>  
>

Nancy

The Pacific Marine Industrial Zone gets rammed down Madang's throat, but we gag and spit it out

Yesterday 12 June I attended the most frightening public forum ever in Madang, the occasion for which was a first public announcement on the proposed Pacific Marine Industrial Zone to be established at Vidar Wharf

here in Alexishafen, Madang, at the site of the RD fishing wharf. I had been alerted to the plans for this in Chamber of Commerce Meetings last year, when our then-president Bill Kramer returned from a junket to the Philippines with Pete Celso of RD, and gleefully presented us glossy brochures from the marine ‘parks’ and industrial clusters he had enjoyed in Mindinao and elsewhere---explaining how ice cream makers sat cheek to jowl with fast food shops in these charming manufacturing tax free zones. I was appalled---at the chutzpah of Celso and the duplicity of the trip itself, clearly a way of winning over the C of C to what was a plan for economies of scale for RD that could solve virtually all its infrastructure costs here in Madang. Invite up to ten more tuna manufacturing plants to sit on their wharf area, and save all the shipping and transport, not to mention electric and water costs (now that Madang town’s services have been stressed to the max by MCC )—eureka! More profits for RD! And of course the argument is that this means harvesting more proceeds from the huge losses PNG makes in its tuna industry, as everyone fishes its waters, and pirates its tuna, for meager licensing fees, then returns elsewhere to process the fish and really rake in the value-added benefits. Bring the value added or downstream processing to mainland PNG, is the argument, where we can become a ‘hub’ for several Pacific island countries tuna capture and processing needs. With enormous tax incentives, the country can seduce many of the trickle down profits to land here, on our shores, including the bandied figures of 20 to 40,000 local jobs! ---Just perfect, RD tuna times ten!

The idea is in itself so ridiculous that the first Chamber of Commerce meeting left us gobsmacked and not a few members walking out snickering at its ludicrousness. We have untold amounts of social and environmental problems with RD as it is (and they have taken a long time to clean up their act), are facing new worries every day with MCC (not to mention violent ones), and Celso---as well as the National Fisheries Authority and the GoPNG----are waving down Pacific traffic to come and join us.

But that was not what frightened most of us at the meeting yesterday. After rumours and feint awareness talks with local councilors only, we had been hearing all kinds of statistics about this Marine ‘Park’---and could hardly generate fears from the general public who kept imagining dancing dolphins and hardwood benches. Yesterday they showed us with what degree of disdain they truly hold the small scale fishing locals in Madang, the people they professed to admire for their generally ‘bel kol’ and peaceful disposition, allowing them to favour the Madang over bellicose highlanders or even Morobeans in this wonderful economic opportunity! Thirty million GoPNG kina having already been invested, dubious consultants from Goroka (with the appropriately Republican name of ‘Heritage’ Research) enlisted to conduct what the overstuffed and self-satisfied spokesperson Steven Dick (appropriate again) boasted to be a first of its kind, unprecedented social mapping exercise combined with a scoping for spin off businesses—a combined government and private interest research effort--  (voila! The perfect conflict of interest! Get the investors to write their own impact assessment and fill it with ‘small business’ opportunities!)---which, as we discovered in the powerpoint he unabashedly presented, included no genealogies whatsoever---as this was State land, after all, we have impact communities and not landowners---and a negligible discussion of social impacts (which the power point explained as an assessment of the ‘socioeconomic status’ of these communities)---as well as a series of 'awareness' talks that would make impact communities ‘feel comfortable’ about the project, and thus cultivate an ‘appreciation’ for its importance.  This, I take it, is the government’s definition of what a social assessment for major resource developments should be.

 

In one slide we saw a list of the ‘Fundamental Understandings’ about this Pacific Marine Industrial Zone (which has its own dancing tuna logo already, not to mention prospectuses available on the NFA website, and numerous government administrators dedicated entirely to its ‘roll out’---including Orry Becker, Project Coordinator and classic bagman). These were:

1. PMIZ land is alienated/State land. [I.e. Fuck you if you think you still own it]
2. No landowners—only PIAP Project Impact Area People [A new non-status]
3. The spinoffs are opportunities—not rights! [This might have come from the mouth of Celso himself, so frustrated by the machinations of Kananam people that he quickly took back all the spinoff businesses of RD from locals]
4. Spinoffs are to be arranged with PMIZ project owners only [forget making your own profit from this]
5. Catch the PMIZ boat or Miss Out!

And it was this last statement that finally stuck in the craw of most Kanamam, Siar, Sek, Krangket, Rempi, and other Bel community leaders, members of the Madang Peoples Forum, yesterday, as they realized they were being slapped in the face with a fate accompli and not, as assumed, being asked their opinion.

Another slide proposed to tell the several clans of the effected communities areas which ones were to benefit vaguely from the BSA agreement, in percentage proportions according to their ancestral use of the Vidar Wharf land (Sek 50%, Rempi 30%, Kananam 20% were their figures), and they listed the clans themselves as:

REMPI : Galgal, Gadbid, Matbob

SEK: Guzub, Kidapein, Panukumak, Pauwaden, Matanam

KANANAM: Gamarmatu, Gewanen, Panufon, Nuwo

And that’s it. Naturally one after another community leader jumped up from their seat to announce that their clan hadn’t been listed and that they were to be directly effected---their fishing, their seas, their villages, their coral reefs, their livelihoods, their health etc.---who was this bozo to tell them who was ‘impacted’ and who was not?!

At one point I said the reasons for this free for all were because the tuna in the Mediteranean had been restricted and now people were freely pirating in our own waters and we know that the amount of fish legally taken is always but a percentage of the overall fish caught, and so this project proposed to invite the problem right into our country rather than solve the problem of a diminishing tuna stock….etc---and in response, the smug NFA rep (who not only whispered to his colleague throughout my comments but virtually sat through the entire three hour meeting playing solitaire on his computer--with imperious disregard even for our Governor, who sat amongst us)explained that what I was talking about was far to complex for these landowners to understand and should be raised in another forum---to which the auditorium collectively groaned and barked, and I said, these people all completely understand what Ive said, they are intimately involved with fisheries issues! Arrrgh! the fairly growled. At another point, when I asked the ‘social mapping’ man if he’d read the RD Tuna report, he said, no, and he has no idea what RD is doing, I shouted back “Well you should!” and again the auditorium yelled for him to get off the stage, he knew nothing---bring us a Madang person to conduct our social mapping! they demanded.

Finally, and most vociferously, they demanded that, despite all kinds of assurances that it would simply be ‘symbolic’, there will be no ground breaking for the PMIZ next week!

Democracy in action. Thank god for the Madang people.

Favorite moment: When they tried to play the promotional VCD for the project and it kept skittering on the monitor, one by one people shouted, "It's corrupted!" " It's a corrupt CD!" ---until the Governor turned and said, Watch your words, and someone said, "We are!"

What's a Marine 'Park' doing in Madang?

Last year at this time the Greenpeace ship Esperanza documented both legal and illegal Philippines flagged and owned vessels transshipping skipjack and yellowfin tuna in a high seas pocket between PNG, The Solomon Islands and the FSM, Marshall Islands and Indonesia. This was only one of countless unobserved, unreported but growing acts of tuna piracy in the southwest Pacific waters. Transshipments at sea by foreign purse seiners are prohibited under the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC), and most Pacific Island Countries prohibit transshipment inside their own Exclusive Economic Zones, requiring the vessels to come to port. Only the Philippine fleets have been given an exemption. Greenpeace reports that, “It is widely recognized that, worldwide, transshipments of fish at sea facilitate illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing. Unfortunately, it seems that the exemption given to the Philippine purse seine fleet is exploited and taken advantage of by illegal Philippine vessels. The lack of monitoring, controlling and surveillance measures and resources in the region provides incentives for illegal vessels to operate side by side with legally registered vessels plundering the Pacific high seas.” (Plundering the Pacific, Greenpeace International Oct 2008)

In this case, the Philippine purse seiners were fishing at sea without a mothership, and as one of their captains reported, they had already effected six separate transshipments to other vessels in the previous month. All of this occurred in the high seas pocket just north of PNG, a ‘Pacific Commons’ that runs from above the mainland of the island of New Guinea all across the underside of the FSM, and begins again just east of the Bismark Archipelago and between PNG and the Solomon Islands (see map in other file). The eight PNA countries had declared these Commons no-fishing zones that very month, but clearly this act means nothing without teeth, and enforcement is sorely lacking in all the fishing authorities and PIC agreements. The collective desire to stem over fishing and halt the documented decline of bigeye and yellowfin stocks in the Pacific can come to nothing without strong regulations and oversight. Philippine fleets continue to come back and transship from the Commons. As Greenpeace report on their findings says,  “It is of great concern that the Philippine fleets seem to target this high seas area in particular, as this has the potential to undermine the effectiveness of the PNA effort in the recovery of the tuna stocks.”

All three vessels recorded by Greenpeace were owned by the Philippines based company, TSO Marine Industries, of South Cotabato. Their owner is the Taiwanese businessman Domingo Teng, who manufactures and wholesales all kinds of marine edibles, and is beloved by General Santos City for supplying most of the jobs in their industrial ‘mall’ named Kimball Plaza.

That high seas zone right above the New Guineamainland is clearly a temptation for many Philippines

fishing boats. In 2006, several RD Tuna Fishing PNG personnel spoke off the record with a Pacific tuna fisheries researcher about their suspicions regarding RD transshipments. They explained how RD motherships Dolly 767 and Dolly Triple 888 each carry 600 tonnes, and Dolly 889 carries 1000 tonnes, of fish, and they all travel full top the Philippines once a month. It is assumed they deliver a total of 2200 tonnes per month of yellowfin tuna and other non-allowable fish caught outside PNG waters (which are therefore barred from being manufactured within PNG). These fish are brought to Vidar, frozen (which is, in fact, a form of processing), and stored at the wharf until the ships are ready to travel to the Philippines. The seven RD tally workers (three at night, four by day) are strictly prohibited from tallying these fish, and so they remain unrecorded, unallowed, untaxed and unlicensed (RD Tuna pays no license fees whatsoever anyway).  This is the kind of hidden extraction that is threatening all Pacific tuna stocks.

Industrial distant water fishing vessels from all over the world are now stealing from the worlds richest tuna grounds, just offshore from PNG. Here live more than half the world’s tuna, and everyone but Papua New Guinea

seems to be getting rich from fishing these waters. The 8 countries that surround this rich maritime resource make less than 5% of the total profits from the US$2 billion industry. But the levels of theft, piracy, illegal transshipment and fraudulent tallies are rising exponentially, creating a dire threat to the West and Central Pacific’s tuna stocks.

This is the result of overfishing the Mediterranean’s own tuna, combined with generally lax policing of these vessels in the Pacific. Mediterranean bluefin tuna is so overfished right now that conservation groups are asking for endangered species status. The European Commission last year forced the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT, the organization responsible for looking after tuna) to reduce the totals allowable catch of bluefin in the Atlantic from 28,500 tonnes to 22,000 and eventually 19,000 in 2010 (a total cut of 30%) just to ensure its viability. This cut is far below what ICCAT’s own scientists suggested, and may still threaten the viability of the stock---if only because it is understood that fishermen generally take about twice the allowable catch anyway (see The Economist Nov 29 2008 p 83). 

Now that the Mediterranean fisheries are restricted, countries like China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, theUSand the EU are simply moving over to the Pacific gobbling up more of these tuna than ever before. Meanwhile, the PNAs are only seeing a pittance in fees. Of course, in the case of tuna pirates, hidden depletions and  illicit offshore transshipments, these countries see no revenues whatsoever.

PNG has long bemoaned its inability to truly profit from its own tuna stock, when so many overseas vessels haul the majority catch away and this country sees a meager amount from licensing revenues. This is why the country has turned to canning tuna, to recoup some of the profits otherwise seen in the Marshall Islands and Fiji

(where so much processing takes place). It has left PNG in a critical dilemma: do we take up the lead in Pacific loining and canning of tuna, or invest in policing this free for all (even if the license fees are negligible)?

For developing Pacific Island countries, it seems to be a one or other prospect. Those agencies responsible for policing the industry and managing the sustainability of tuna have dropped the ball in recent years, ignoring conservationists’ suggestions and bowing to fishing industry demands now that Mediterranean stocks are restricted. Instead, the consensus seems to be to beat the exploiters at their own game. Before investing in improved fisheries management, regulations or even the policing of standards, Papua New Guinea

’s national government has chosen to invite the industry to process all the tuna in its own backyard.  

Let’s turn the historic centre of Madang, the Vidar Plantation at Alexishafen, home to the first Lutheran, then Catholic Missions in Madang, and site of important WWII landings, into an Industrial Park! 

Just prior to this event in May the country got first word of a planned Marine Park for Madang, when the PNG Commerce and Industry Minister explained that this is a means to recoup the profits lost by PNG in the Pacific Tuna Industry:

“He said presently the Pacific region contributes 67% of tuna to the world tuna market and only gains US$67 million (K1.9 billion [sic]) from fishing access fees from foreign vessels that fish for tuna in the region.” (The National 3 March 2008).

[John Burton, blogging in response to this comment wrote: “K1.9 billion! Holy smokes. Ha the kina dropped to 3.5 cents us?]

In January 2008 eight Pacific countries agreed to tuna catch restrictions in an attempt to conserve Western Pacific tuna stocks. Ironically, two of the countries that had voted in January of 2008 to impose catch restrictions on Western Pacific tuna stocks ( Nauru and  Solomon Islands), were amongst the first to express an interest in investing in this manufacturing Shangri-la. Plans for this industrial clustering can be found on the IPA, the FFA, and the PNG NFA websites, on the last of which we read that the Madang Marine Park Holdings Ltd was registered as early as 2007 (--who knew?) as a vehicle for the joint private-public venture, sponsored by the National Government’s Public Investment Program.  The total projected investment is said to be US $33 million, but the National Government is said to have invested K7 million already, even before any ground has been broken. According to a statement published by the National Fisheries Authority and the Secretary of the Department of Commerce and Industry, Anton Kulit,  “a study tour was conducted to PNG and the Philippines

in February 2007 to assess the potential for value-added shore-based activities covering transshipment, dockyard and slipways, wharves, provisioning and downstream processing activities.”  That must have been some package tour.

Eight PIC countries are parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA) and it is their waters that contain some of the richest tuna stocks left in the world today. The proposed Madang Marine Industrial Park Project, as it is called, is an attempt to harness greater profits from these stocks in the form of a regional transshipment and processing hub for the entire region. This means loineries, fish meal processing plants, canneries, spin-off businesses like rope-making and snack food manufacturing, catering services, dormitories, you name it. And with them, sex work, sexually transmitted disease, domestic abuse, ethnic tensions, landowner strife and a general mushrooming of a peasant economy dependant upon the North Coast people’s gardens and private fishing sources. Yes---here in Madang, just up the north coast road. At Alexishafen, the historical base for both the Lutheran and Catholic Missions in Madang. Where Catholic nursing sisters still provide critical care to North Coast

people from Rempi to Siar. Site of important WWII landings, and home to several war wrecks, and focal point of the province’s WWII tourism.  How extraordinary that none of us here in Madang have known of these plans that date from 2007. Every one of our businesses that depend on tourism, clean water, employee housing and safety, all of which have just begun to feel the pinch of MCC’s presence at Basamuk, have not benefited from any of these backroom deals.

Plunder and ‘progress’ in the Pacific

It is a cost benefit question. First, for those tuna canning businesses already established in PNG, the attraction to having all the value-added services aggregated in this country, and perhaps eve in one coastal site, it irresistible. Economies of scale make the proposed Fishing Eco-Zone in Madang especially attractive, because the 7 to 10 canneries that might be established over 100 hectares of Vidar Plantation land, where they could then share electrical, water, fuel, and most importantly labour costs; with flexible investment laws, discounted access fees and huge tax incentives (all part of the DCI prospectus), they could all see better profits than ever before.

But for Madang people, the down side is bleaker. Despite talk about 40,000 jobs being created (The National 3 March 2008) at the Marine Park, it is hard to imagine how Madang people will benefit. Our experience with MCC tells us that most of those jobs will go to foreign nationals, and our experience with RD further suggests the bulk of low-paying labour openings that might exist will go to young women, standing for 8 to 10 hours a day for 6 days a week to earn K80 a fortnight (after deductions). The RD Tuna website tells us: “The Company’s 3500 strong workforce form a merry mix of personalities from diverse backgrounds and cultures. Just like the company, a majority of the employees are young with ages ranging from 18 to 30 years.”

When the Provincial and National government tell us a Marine ‘Park’ represents job creation, we are not told that these jobs are peasant labour bringing only the gloss of cash into the community, not lifting the overall standard of living. The women working at RD generally spend the majority of their pay packets on the clothes and grooming required to be an employee, and their families are actually tasked with supporting their subsistence. K80/fortnight will not feed a family on money, so all the Siar and Kananam people are currently burdened by the care of this important demographic group—looking after them as if they were dependents not breadwinners. Instead, that K80 goes right into the town shops that sells endless assortments of the same foreign goods, and virtually siphon off the income to their overseas account. This is certainly a factor in some of the anti-Asian sentiment in Madang and elsewhere: the fact that no one makes a living wage, and that money gets frittered away to non-national businesses. In Wewak, for example, the women who work in SST freely admit that they would make more in the markets every week, and would, in addition, be feeding their family as they gardened, but they work at the factory so that they can established a working history and get a foothold in the cash economy for the time when a better job might be available.

Imagine ten such canneries here in Madang, and the non-national population that necessarily arrives with them. Imagine thousands of young women migrants from around the country, willing to leave villages and domestic chores aside to live in a dormitory outside Madang. Yes, its true, this is perfectly legal and no one will have forced them to come. But because no one is required to, no one is taking a broader view of the consequences. NGOs are beginning to make noise about the overfishing dangers, the industrial pollution and the radiating woes of clustered manufacturing sitting at one of the world’s most important marine biodiversity spots. But the Madang public has been kept in the dark about the Fisheries and Tuna Industry’s plans, so they may be confused by these one-sided warnings.

Madang’s business community has also been kept in the dark.  The MCI-NFA prospectus explains that Madang is called “’Beautiful Madang’ because of its rich array of flora and fauna. The Province is a popular tourist destination because of its rich culture and friendly local inhabitants.”

These promotional materials sing the praises of this town fully aware, not doubt, that they also spell their death knell. Marine ‘Park’? Maybe it can itself become  another tourist attraction? Dancing dolphins? Water slides and ice cream vendors? Anyone who has  visited Fiji’s tax free zone, or Majuro’s cannery slums, will see the humor in that. Those of us who have knowledge of Kiribati will also note the sex tourism irony in that proposition.

Around the world, the seas are suffering. In the Pacific, the tragedy is that they are suffering not at the hands of their traditional caretakers, the people who have for generations fished and managed these waters. But they suffer at the hands of a global fishing industry, feeding people far away from these waters who have no idea of the impact their palettes make on these irreplaceable ecosystems. Today there are new discussions of harvesting seabed minerals, and energy, and even of using it to store carbon. Technology has made all of this simpler and affordable, just as it has turned what were once thought inexhaustible supplies of fish into beleaguered small schools of them. A paper published by Nature in 2003, shows 13 charts of the catch per 100 hooks in different fishing zones around the globe, and the authors report that their analysis “suggests that the global ocean has lost more than 90% of large predatory fishes”---these are cod, groupers, salmon, tuna and all the other ones we love to eat. (cited by The Economist Jan 3 2009, p 10-11). If we cannot manage this precious tuna resource in PNG’s own waters, and manage it for the future, not simply for the short-term gain, then how can we be expected to look after our seabeds, our carbon storage and our marine energy sources?

Usury makes a big comeback

April’s issue of Harper’s Magazine has a terrific story by Daniel Brook on the new forms of usury available to the working poor in the US and Europe, although the article focuses on the US: Specifically on the check cashing businesses that ‘loan’ advances on a person’s paycheck at what are, without any doubt, excruciatingly usurious rates. These are fortnightly loans intended to be paid back by one’s next pay packet, which permits people, psychologically, to consent to paying as much as $50 on a $250 advance, even though this is an illegally high (indeed legally ‘usurious’) per annum lending rate. Interest rates can be as high as 1500% an astonishing amount. And the trick is (think about it): if you can’t get through this pay period without an advance, you’re highly unlikely to be able to pay off that loan plus 25 or 50 bucks on the next fortnight’s pay. Inevitably these loans get rolled over and over and over, which is apparently legal, if not ethical, until yes indeed, someone has paid off a $300 loan, after late fees and interest, with $4500---after successive harassing letters and perhaps even quasi-legal threats. [Pounds Till Payday, for example, is just one of several online and offshore payday loan companies---this one operates from Malta and is pitched to the UK borrower---charges an APR of 2,225 %, reports Lisa Bachelor The Observer 29 Sunday 2008.]

These customers are people who don’t retain lawyers and don’t have the time or resources to take the company to small claims court to legally determine what their allowable interest might be. More often than not, they don’t care. Sometimes the interest they’re paying on a single loan is less than a bank’s overdraft charge, so the deal looks pretty good from the start. It’s only when these loans are extended and recalibrated that the screws begin to turn. This is when the small self-styled public service operations (that paint themselves in the colours of anti-capitalism goodwill, the new face of microcredit for the masses, and so forth) become more like the usurers of First testament form, whose extortionist lending practices were listed by prophet Ezekiel as among the most “abominable things,” along with rape, murder, robbery and idolatry (Ezekiel 18:19-13). These are truly entrepreneurial forms of avarice, whether float on the internet ether as sonicpaydayland.com, mycashnow.com, Moneysupermarket.com or Moneyexpert.com, or set up small shops in the strip malls of America under signs that read Checking Cashing Inc., Check ‘n Go, Check Into Cash, or Advance America.

The really needy need not apply

You cannot really be destitute or ne’er do well to avail their services, even though they invite those with bad credit histories to apply. Their market is the working poor, those without collateral for serious bank loans, but a regular paycheck that’s covering less and less of a household’s basic needs these days, but enough to convince the earner they deserve to splurge on a birthday, a shopping spree, maybe even a pallet of beer. It makes sense that they’re always found near military bases and manufacturing plants. Where working stiffs are today’s most indentured of the hapless poor. These are the folks most effected by the predatory subprime mortgages, upon whose backs the American economy is rebuilding itself by bailing out the big banks. Some overlap also exists with the new evangelical crowd who bought the haute-capitalist ethic of money as manna, and began to worship brands as a sign of the Lord’s benevolence. Some of the makeshift cant of these doorstep lenders invoke the ideas of social and religious righteousness, of working outside the oppressive banking system, and fulfilling Martin Luther’s promise in his Poor People’s Campaign---coming to finally get their check from the Man---and carving out their own corner of prosperity theology.

Michelle Leder reports in Slate Magazine May 10, 2004 (‘How the Other Half Banks: The depressing, amazing "payday loan" business’) quotes John L. Rabenold, a spokesman for Check 'n Go, as saying, "Our customers don't think they're making a bad financial decision."

Filthy lucre at an arm’s length

But the big banks know they are. That’s why most of these lending companies are small private firms which wouldn’t be touched with a ten foot pole by Bank or America (of Westpak or ANZ). They’re so obviously usurious, so reminiscent of loan sharks chewing toothpicks, that you can almost imagine an industry of would-be Scrooges kicking themselves with envy as they publicly condemn their brazenly low-brow exploitation. Why didn’t we think of that?! As Leder goes on to say: “Perhaps that's why Wall Street is so excited about Dollar Financial, one of the remaining prizes. Dollar, based in Berwyn, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb, expects to go public sometime this summer… Wall Street is lining up to support Dollar's offering, which points to the ambivalent relationship it has with the payday-loan business. Despite the huge potential profits, retail banks have shied away from offering payday loans, because they know it would tarnish their reputation... They have the financial might to cut rates down to much lower levels, but they don't want to be seen as exploiting the poor—after all, they would still charge 10 times the interest rate on a small, short-term loan as on a large, long-term one. Yet at the same time banks avoid issuing payday loans, they happily accept the payday-loan companies as clients. Citibank won't operate a payday-loan business, but Citigroup is going to be the lead underwriter on Dollar's IPO.”

Elsewhere, Lisa Bachelor of The Observer (29 June 2008) reports that Citizens Advice in the UK has a client who approached them for help on her £8,000 debts. She’s a single mother of a ten year old, with a weekly income of £83 statutory sick pay and £200 in state benefits. “One of her debts was a payday loan, taken out online,” writes Bachelor, “with an APR of 1,355 per cent. 'Her mental health was deteriorating and her financial situation was becoming increasingly impossible,' said a Citizens Advice spokesman.”

 We borrow to give

All of this interests me because the European and American media have also been reporting another trend, far more salubrious, but much less surprising. They’re telling us that poor people are more generous than the rich. Despite the astronomical trickle-down of those like Bill and Melinda Gates who soared to the top of the old capitalist order, only to give billions away as proof that reaganomics can work for the very few, it seems that statistics are telling us the era of greed really was greedy after all. Billions of philanthrocapital dollars and yen and euros later, we can still conclude that money only makes you more stingy than before. Warren Buffet may be generous, but the majority of extremely well-heeled people simply don’t give as much---proportionately---as do the poor---that’s what we’re being told. If I make $500/year growing coffee in Brazil, I am more likely to give half my income away to those needier than myself than is any multimillionaire, not to mention the many nouveau billionaires of the late 20th century.

Frank Greve writes in McClatchy Newspapers online May 19 2009 (America’s poor are its most generous) that those who have less, give more:

“When Jody Richards saw a homeless man begging outside a downtown McDonald's recently, he bought the man a cheeseburger. There's nothing unusual about that, except that Richards is homeless, too, and the 99-cent cheeseburger was an outsized chunk of the $9.50 he'd earned that day from panhandling….

“‘The lowest-income fifth (of the population) always give at more than their capacity,’ said Virginia Hodgkinson, former vice president for research at Independent Sector, a Washington-based association of major nonprofit agencies. ‘The next two-fifths give at capacity, and those above that are capable of giving two or three times more than they give.’

“Indeed, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest survey of consumer expenditure found that the poorest fifth of America's households contributed an average of 4.3 percent of their incomes to charitable organizations in 2007. The richest fifth gave at less than half that rate, 2.1 percent. The figures probably undercount remittances by legal and illegal immigrants to family and friends back home, a multibillion-dollar outlay to which the poor contribute disproportionally. None of the middle fifths of America's households, in contrast, gave away as much as 3 percent of their incomes.”

One informant, Tanya Davis, a 40 year old laid-off security guard and single mother, seemed to hit the nail on the head when she told Greve: ’As a rule, people who have money don't know people in need.’ Rich people don’t live in needy contexts. Cash-poor people are constantly being hit up. But even if you turn to the Pacific, where lunch grows on the trees and people are only precariously launched into a cash economy (and remain very dependent still on gardens and jungles and the sea), you find more material generosity than you might expect, and it doesn’t confirm to a needy-not-needy formula. Needy people give, less needy people give, and the rich make great displays of generosity in order to place others in their debt. The answer is that the western capitalist model is just culturally different from the non-western one, even that which is partially capitalist.

We borrow to go to Harvard Business School to pledge our integrity

But again, we live to be surprised. Another line of news is reporting on business school students in the States who are pledging to be different, to cut the chord with the me generation past and represent a new era of capitalism with integrity. Jacob Ganz of National Public Radio online (May 31 2009) reports that:

“It seems that a group of MBA candidates at Harvard Business School, surveying the wasteland that that has been made of their soon-to-be profession, have decided that new business managers should hold themselves accountable to something more than insane short-term growth and ridiculous bonuses. “

And so, this month, the MBA Oath was born. It's sort of ‘a management equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath,’ writes Max Anderson, a 2009 HBS grad, on the website… “The oath is strictly voluntary, but so far it's been signed by over 100 recent HBS grads, plus a handful of new MBAs from other institutions around the country.

 The short version of the oath [is]:

As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing together people and resources to create value that no single individual can build alone. Therefore I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term. I recognize that my decisions can have far-reaching consequences that affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future. As I reconcile the interests of different constituencies, I will face difficult choices.

Therefore, I promise:

--I will act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner.

--I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers, and the society in which we operate.

--I will manage my enterprise in good faith, guarding against decisions and behavior that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.

--I will understand and uphold, both in letter and in spirit, the laws and contracts governing my own conduct and that of my enterprise.

--I will take responsibility for my actions, and will represent the performance and risks of my enterprise accurately and honestly.

--I will develop both myself and other managers under my supervision so that the profession continues to grow and contribute to the well-being of society.

--I will strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide.

--I will be accountable to my peers and they will be accountable to me for living by this oath.

This oath I make freely, and upon my honor.

This has got to really piss of their parents, the brokers and financiers who were fleeced in the economic crisis and now carry near-usurious loans to send their kids to HBS.

Charley Boorman & Co zoom through

These past two weeks our company has been fixer for the BBC program, By Any means, starring Charley Boorman (famed for his Long Way Down shows with Ewan MacGregor, which are so well known that we barely had to refer to them to open doors for the production everywhere). The premise is that Charley, a lovable rogue, jumps on any and all forms of transport to get from point A to B, and in this series he came north through Australia, traveled roughly east to west through PNG, and will now move on to Indonesia, the Philippines, China and ultimately Japan—sometime in August. We’ve had a ball with these guys, who are a crew of four: Charley, Sam Simon the Director, Robin Shek on camera, and Claudio Planta on camera, traveling with Josh Meraveka and Chris Dominic of our company. Understandably, PNG has had a few more rough edges than other places, but they’ve been exceptionally good natured throughout, from a seaplane on Horn island that never flew—and required them to charter a plane at great cost; to a Trans West Transport lorry along the Markham Valley up to Goroka; to Ela Motors motorbikes down the old Bundi Road from Kegesugl to Madang (a truly heroic journey). We have to thank Peter Boyd in Lae, Peter Jackson in POM, Megan Taureka at Ela Motors, Marcel Poole of the VSO in Goroka; John and Cynthea Leahy in Goroka; Emmanual Yama on the Bundi Road, and Betty Higgins in Kegesugl for that long and absolutely trouble-free leg of the trip.

 

In Madang they slept all over our floors and caught their breath before pushing off up the north coast road on a PMV (waiting for which, and loading, could have been a segment in itself---downtown Madang with crowds of well-wishers), to dinghies that took them through the Muruk Lakes and into the very tiny remote village of Gapun, smack dab between the Sepik and the Ramu Rivers, where the hung out with anthropologist Don Kulick for two days, hearing about his follow-up linguistic work with these people who, thanks to Don’s brilliant first book (1992), Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction, have taught us (and by us I mean anthropologists and PNG students) much of what we know about language loss in PNG today. From there they motorcanoed to Angoram, PMV’ed to Wewak, trucked to Aitape, and banana-boated to Sissano to stay with m daughter Joyce’s family, the Rainbubus, before pushing on to stay with Gabriel Ellis of the VSO in Vanimo, and checking out the border, just prior to fling out an on to KL. Whew, Im breathless. Great travelers, keen for everything, boundless enthusiasm, minimal vanity.

 

 

Among the millions of other people to thank---Including Martarina in Wewak, Maran Nateleo and Ben Keri of the Aitape Foundation, Dixon Mandengat and his Uncle Arthur, Don Kulick, and Gabriel Ellis….we have to say thank god for mobile phones, for Digicel first, but then on the north coast, for B Mobile, where Digicel doesn’t exist. They sure ate a lot of our budget.

So to Charley and Co., we miss you---happy travels. Come back soon --with Ewan eh?

The new xenophobia

The following message has been circulating on paper and by email---I reproduce the text to the letter here:

All Asian owned Cottage Business like Takka Shops around the country must cease by 31 December 2009. This is the dateline set the grassroots of Papua New Guinea. Any Asian owned shops, whether they are Chinese, Malaysian, Philippines, Indians, must and will come to a total stop by 31 December 2009.

 

 

Papua new Guineans will take it on the street again and make a more formal, lasting impact on the streets of PNG like the one that happened in Honiara. The government is too sympathetic and has failed the people of PNG. Everyone seems to be apologizing for what has happened and none of the so called leaders seem to understand how the inflow of illegal Asians are stealing business opportunities and jobs from helpless PNGans. It's costing the country simple store-keeper jobs and denying the privilege of simple PNGans owning these businesses. Competition among the Asians themselves has left not a chance for would-be PNGans.

 

Majority of the politicians seem to dig into the Asian pockets. Whether directly or indirectly, from Takka Shop owners to big investment giants like RH and Ramu Nickel, the corrupt government is already trapped in most of these deals. The country does not belong to the politicians to sell it cheaply at the cost of ordinary and helpless Papua New Guinean lives, costing their jobs, businesses and putting them on the streets. If the very government which is elected to protect the very rights they are cheaply trading for personal gain, the people must act! If the formal processes in place that are supposed to be enforced and promoted by the government are not working, the people must do it the informal way. Enough is enough.

 

 

 

Not only taking away our jobs and business opportunities but from illegal gambling to prostitution and Asian Mafia, this country is being truly corrupted by Asians. Our politicians are selling this country and its resources at cheap prices. No real tangible economic benefits. Tax monies and royalties are being spent left, right and center by cronies and their close counterparts, majority of it on unfounded claims. If that's not enough, the so-called politicians are now letting our simple jobs and simple businesses being stolen right from our very hands!

 

The rule of the grassroots will be this and very clear: No more Asians owning Cottage Businesses in PNG by 31 December 2009. Or otherwise, we will celebrate 2010 New Year with bon fires of all Asian owned Takka Shops in flames all around the country. That will be the solution. Forget the government. If they can't do it, we will do it ourselves! No need to buy candlesticks on New Years Eve. We can afford to destroy what we can take back and own ourselves but we cannot let what is rightfully oursd be stolen from us permanently!

 

 

 

Forward this to all Patriotic sons and daughters of this beautiful nation.

 

Remember DATELINE IS 31 DECEMBER 2009! GRASSROOTS WILL ACT! EM MIPLA TOK! EM COPUNTRY BLO YUMI!

James Chin on the Chinese In PNG

Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies

, Volume Two, 2008

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,

第二卷, 2008

117

Contemporary Chinese Community in Papua–New

Guinea: Old Money versus New Migrants

©2008 James Chin

Introduction

1

It is extremely difficult to obtain precise or accurate data on the present state of the

ethnic Chinese population in Papua–New Guinea (PNG). In fact, it is almost certain that

precise figures are simply not available, given the lax border controls and extensive

corruption in the PNG bureaucracy.

2

At the official level, there are several government bodies that are in a position to

give a tally of ‘official’ foreigner numbers in the country. The first is the Immigration

Department. This the frontline department that controls all entry and exit points in the

country. Second is the Investment Promotion Authority (IPA) which regulates foreign

companies operating in PNG. Third is the Department of Labour and Industrial

Relations which issues the work permits. They have a fair idea on the number of

foreigners as they keep records of foreigners with approved work visas. Another

government entity that is supposed to keep track of foreigners in PNG is the National

Intelligence Organisation (NIO). There are major problems in all these departments.

Extensive corruption and incompetence have rendered any figures they have wholly

unreliable.

3

The situation is so bad that the passport office ran out of blank passports

and Australia had to step in to provide the machine to issue work permits. There is also

an extensive work permit scam in operation where just about any foreign national can

secure a work permit by paying a bribe. It is not uncommon for a foreigner to arrive at

Jacksons International airport with a valid work permit but unable to understand a single

word of English. The minimum criterion for getting a work permit in PNG is, obviously,

the ability to communicate in English.

Another source of information is the embassies and diplomatic representatives.

When it comes to the ethnic Chinese, the most useful sources are the Malaysian,

Indonesian and People’s Republic of China (PRC) embassies. In addition, there is the

honorary consul for Singapore and Taiwanese Trade Mission (PNG only recognizes

PRC). The figures given by the diplomatic community are also problematic as many

citizens simply do not register their presence with their respective embassies and

diplomatic representatives. For example, there are many ethnic Chinese Malaysian

businessmen trading outside Port Moresby who do not bother to register with the

Malaysian High Commission. Many Indonesian Chinese cross the border at Jayapura

and do not have any contact with the Indonesian officials in PNG. One could argue that,

for many, such as the PRC Chinese who are involved in illegal activities, they stay as

far away from the PRC Embassy as possible.

Thus the unofficial sources are better. Some of the key ones are the Cathay Club,

Malaysian Business Club (MBC), the PNG–China Friendship Association (PCA), and

businessmen themselves. The Cathay Club represents the “old” PNG Chinese, those

Chinese who settled in PNG prior to independence, who use English as their main

language of communication and are almost all Christians. The MBC as the name

1

James Chin was Chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Papua New Guinea in the late

1990s. He is now Head of the Faculty of Arts and Social Science at Monash University’s Malaysian campus.

2

This is a written version of a talk presented by the author at “Chinese in the Pacific: Where to Now?”

international workshop, organized by the CSCSD at the ANU in Canberra, February 2007.

3

PNG is regularly ranked by Transparency International as one of the most corrupt places to do business.

Contemporary Chinese Community in PNG

118

suggests, represents mostly Malaysian businessmen, who are almost all ethnic

Chinese. Singaporean businessmen, who are almost all ethnic Chinese as well, tend to

be friendly with MBC members and many of them attend MBC-organized functions. The

PCA is a fairly new organization, established after a surge of Chinese migration to PNG

in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These organizations are useful in providing a broad

overview about their communities. As they are not tied to the government, they do not

really care about the official status of their members, thus providing a clearer picture of

what is happening within their communities.

The best sources, however, are personal contacts with some of the major

businessmen or business houses. Although their information is often clouded by

business jealously and rivalries, they nevertheless still provide a useful insights into the

thinking of Chinese businessmen. They represent an important, if necessarily

unacknowledged, source for my paper.

So while there are no precise figures on the number of ethnic Chinese in PNG, my

guess is that there were probably about 20,000 (excluding the PNG Chinese) in the

early 2000s. This figure does not distinguish between legal and illegal residents.

Mainland Chinese (including Taiwanese) would account for about half, or 10,000;

Malaysian Chinese for about 6-8000; Indonesian Chinese for about 1000; and

Singaporeans fewer than two hundred.

Old and New Chinese

For the purpose of this paper, ethnic Chinese are categorized into two broad

categories. The first is the ‘old’ Chinese. This group is fairly easy to identify. They are

essentially the descendents of the first immigrants from mainland China who lived

through the process of colonization and who tend to share some common traits. As

mentioned, they are almost all Christians and use English as their first language. Most

of them also traced their homes to Rabaul and, if they can afford it, send their children

to study in Australia (mostly to Queensland and New South Wales).

4

Most of them were

Koumintang (KMT) supporters until the 1960s when they became more neutral after

they realized that the KMT had no prospects of ever regaining control of the mainland.

When Australia gave independence to PNG in 1975, they were given a choice of taking

up either Australian or PNG citizenship. The bulk of them left for Australia. Those who

stayed behind began to expand their businesses beyond Rabual, and today they control

much of the ‘national’ wholesale trade.

5

Because of their long association with PNG, the ‘old’ Chinese tend to pride

themselves on ‘knowing’ the country and the people. They claim to have an excellent

relationship with the nationals and are committed to the long term development of the

country. This is despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of these PNG Chinese,

that is those who are PNG citizens, hold permanent residency status in Australia and, in

almost all cases, have a home somewhere in Australia. Some of them involve

themselves in PNG politics, mostly as fund raisers for major PNG politicians or act as

middlemen. They are also proud that some of the mixed-blood people who are

prominent in PNG politics—the most famous being Sir Julius Chan, a former prime

4

For a good overview of the Rabaul Chinese, see David Wu,

The Chinese in Papua New Guinea: 1880–1980

(Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1982). The most recent works on the PNG Chinese are Ichikawa

Tetsu, “Chinese in Papua New Guinea: Strategic Practices in Sojourning”,

Journal of Chinese Overseas,

Vol.

2, No. 1 (May 2006); and Hank Nelson, ‘The Chinese in Papua New Guinea’, Discussion Paper 2007/3, State,

Society and Governance in Melanesia (SSGM), ANU.

5

PNG citizens are commonly referred to as ‘nationals’.

Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies

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minister, who speaks Cantonese fluently—have maintained close links with the old

PNG Chinese community.

Turning to the ‘new’ Chinese, I have categorized them into two groups. The first

contains Southeast Asian Chinese, comprising mostly ethnic Chinese from Malaysia,

Singapore and Indonesia.

6

The second are the mainland Chinese and Taiwanese.

Chinese Malaysians

Politically, they are the most influential of the newcomers. Broadly speaking, they can

be further sub-divided into two groups: traders and timber merchants.

7

Ethnic Chinese

Malaysians first arrived in significant numbers after independence, in the late 1970s and

early 1980s. Many of them came to PNG as working professionals, attracted by the

strong local currency (Kina) which at one point was worth more than the US dollar. After

completing their contracts, some stayed on and started trading companies. Most of

those who came in the 1980s came as traders. Some of the most prominent such

companies, by the late 1990s and early 2000s, were the TST Group of Companies,

Trophy Haus and Bintangnor Trading.

TST is named after its founder, Tan Siew Tin. Tan, from Klang in Malaysia, first

came to PNG to work but soon realized he could make a lot of money importing cheap

consumer items from Malaysia and Singapore. From one store, he now controls half-adozen

in Port Moresby and was easily the biggest Malaysian trader until the 1990s.

Despite his success in Port Moresby he did not expand beyond there. Like all Chinese

businessmen, he takes a ‘hands-on’ approach to business. He is a well known figure in

Port Moresby and even stood as a candidate in the 2002 PNG general elections after

he took out PNG citizenship. Although he lost badly,

8

his actions typified the ‘cowboy’

mentality among ethnic Chinese Malaysian businessmen, who believe you should be

willing to try anything, even politics. More recently, he is dividing his time between

Malaysia and PNG. Most of his family prefer to live in Singapore rather than in PNG.

Frankie Gui of Nambawan Trophy Haus is another prominent Chinese Malaysian

businessman in Port Moresby. His main business used to be providing sporting

equipment to schools and the government, along with the wholesale trading of

consumer items. He was very successful until a series of bad property deals forced him

to downsize his business. What is interesting about Frankie is his son’s willingness to

take over from his father. Normally, the families of such men reside outside PNG,

usually in Malaysia or Australia.

The third interesting Chinese Malaysian businessman is John Sia of Bintangor

Trading, named after the small town in Sarawak state (Malaysia) where John

originated. Sia first came to PNG as a worker for a timber company. After leaving the

company, he started Bintangor Trading by importing consumer items for sale in the

highlands. Now his company dominates the wholesale trade in the highlights, from his

flagship store in Goroka. This is interesting because, traditionally, Chinese Malaysian

6

I have decided not to include Filipino Chinese in this category for the following reasons. Most of the Filipino

Chinese in PNG do not consider themselves ethnic Chinese, they see themselves as Filipinos. Moreover,

most of them work as professionals and do not run their own businesses. And finally, many in this group have

mestizo ancestry rather than purely Chinese.

7

Strictly speaking Malaysian companies are also active in palm oil activities. However they will not be

covered here as these companies are not owned by ethnic Chinese Malaysians. For example, East New

Britain Palm Oil Company, one of the largest oil palm producers, is owned by Kulim which is majority owned

by the government of Malaysia. Another major Malaysian owned company operating in PNG is UMW which

deals with heavy machinery. Its parent company in Malaysia is a public-listed company with the Malaysian

government being the majority shareholder.

8

He joked that even his employees did not vote for him.

Contemporary Chinese Community in PNG

120

businessmen stayed away from the highlands, given it lawless environment and

problems of access.

Outside these bigger companies, Chinese Malaysians also own and run

construction companies, as well as gaming machines and the weekly lottery. Numerous

owner-operator businesses also exist, including stores, auto repairs, bottle shops,

restaurants, and, in recent years, outlets for the sale of pirated DVDs and VCDs.

9

The

owners have no real commitment to the country and most of their profits are repatriated

overseas.

Timber Merchants

No discussion of ethnic Chinese Malaysians in PNG can be completed without

mentioning the timber merchants. There were at least half-a-dozen Malaysian timber

companies operating in the 1980s but, from the early 1990s, the biggest and the most

prominent is RH (PNG). RH stands for Rimbunan Hijau or ‘Forever Green’. RH is,

without doubt, the biggest timber operator in PNG. It is impossible to say with any real

accuracy how big their operation is, as they operate through hundreds of subsidiaries.

However, industry insiders claim that they easily control more than 70 percent of all

logging operations in PNG, directly and indirectly. RH (PNG) claims that it employs

more than 5000 nationals, making it one of PNG’s largest private sector employers.

RH’s roots in Malaysia are in the town of Sibu, in the state of Sarawak. It is a familyrun

conglomerate with extensive holdings in the financial sector, property, media,

forestry, and oil palm plantations in Central America, Southeast Asia, Africa, New

Zealand, the South Pacific, and China. It even runs logging operations in Siberia,

Russia. Its majority shareholder and family head, Tiong

10

Hiew King, is regularly listed

as one of Asia’s richest men. He appears in the 2008 edition of Forbes’ billionaires list,

and is ranked the tenth richest person in Malaysia.

11

For many years, the man in charge

of RH’s country operations in PNG was the son-in-law of Tiong.

From timber operations, RH (PNG) has expanded into finance, property

development, supermarket and wholesale trading, restaurants, a computer company

(Comserv), and the hotel industry (in Vanimo). They are also building the largest

hotel/shopping complex in Waigani, just opposite the main administrative centre. RH is

also planning to move into oil palm plantations. Some of these operations function

outside RH (PNG) and its subsidiaries. RH is also reputed to own a major financial

institution in Port Moresby, Kina Securities. Although the financial company’s main

shareholders are registered in Hong Kong, they are known to be RH associates.

RH’s role in PNG is controversial for several reasons. First, many environmentalists

have accused it of unsustainable and illegal logging.

12

Other people bring accusations

of treating national timber workers badly, with company excesses said to range from

beatings to sexual harassment and rape. A third set of accusations deal with corruption,

in particular that RH corrupts PNG politics by bribing key government politicians to

protect its illegal logging, and by underpaying excise duties on the logs. The literature

on unsustainable logging is extensive and there is no need for me to go into detail on it

here. On the issue of corruption and tax evasion, clear evidence exists from the 1980s.

The infamous Thomas Barneet Commission in 1989 laid out in excruciating detail how

9

Malaysia is the centre of illegally pirated DVDs and VCDs in Southeast Asia. The ‘quality’ of these pirated

DVDs and VCDs is so good that they are exported all over the world.

10

Tiong is a Foochow Chinese. In some documents his surname is spelt as Thiong.

11

.http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/21/malaysia-richest-billionaires-biz-malaysiarichest08-

x_sm_0521malaysia_land.html

12

There is an extensive literature on this issue. For a concise summary, see Greg Roberts, “The Rape of

PNG Forests”,

The Australian

, 23 June 2006.

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RH and its agents systematically paid off PNG politicians who threatened their logging

operations. Even current Prime Minister Michael Somare was implicated in the report.

He was referred to the Ombudsman Commission for allegedly lying under oath about a

logging concession held by the Sepik River Development Corporation (SRDC) in East

Sepik Province. The Commission report also gave details of transfer pricing to escape

taxes worth millions of Kina.

Although the PNG Forest Association (a lobby group representing loggers) claims

the industry was ‘cleaned up’ after the Barneet Inquiry, a government minister publicly

disputed this. In 2004 a World Bank-led review of eleven logging operations found

many regulations and procedures were ignored or bypassed by both the loggers and

the regulatory departments.

13

Then in 2006, when the former PNG Environment

minister Sasa Zibe was sacked because he opposed logging, he publicly named RH as

responsible for his removal.

14

RH’s political interest in PNG is best reflected by the establishment of a daily paper,

The National

, which is well known for promoting RH and the logging industry in general.

The Post Courier

, the other, Australian-owned, daily regularly publishes anti-logging

stories which do not appear in

The National

. Controlling one of only two daily

newspapers in PNG gave RH real political cloud which has probably increased, as it is

widely believed that The National’s circulation has surpassed its rival. This is important

for RH because, unlike the traders, it plans to be in PNG for the long term. When some

Chinese Malaysians left PNG in the late 1990s due to the rapid depreciation of the

Kina, RH (PNG) actually increased its investment there, taking advantage of the weak

Kina to acquire many assets ‘on the cheap’. Part of the reason why RH is willing to

invest in the long term is no doubt due to its ability to influence political decisions.

That Malaysian nationals have played such a prominent role in PNG’s economy is

due in part to the close relationship between PNG and Malaysia. Like Julius Chan

before him, Prime Minister Somare is known to be close to Malaysia and has taken his

family on holiday there for Christmas. Prior to his retirement, Prime Minister Mahathir

Mohammad also visited PNG as part of his farewell tour. Senior politicians see

Malaysia as a role model for development without compromising sovereignty and see

Malaysia’s rejection of the IMF during the 1997—98 Asian currency crises as its

greatest international achievement. Many of the same elite members see Malaysia’s

ability to stand up to major powers as the model for what they should be doing in regard

to Australia.

Singaporean Chinese

When the kina was strong, there were more Singaporean businessmen in PNG. When

the kina lost more than 50 percent of its value in the 1990s, many Singaporean

businessmen left. Today they number only in the low hundreds. Even this number can

be disputed, as some of these ‘Singaporeans’ are actually Malaysians working for

Singapore-registered companies. Those who live in PNG tend to own small businesses

such as second hand car sales and spare parts. Others are mostly passive investors

who fly in regularly to monitor their investments. Although there were attempts to attract

Singaporean investors in infrastructure projects in recent times, most of them were

unsuccessful due to PNG’s uncertain political and economic outlook.

13

“

Logging, Legality and Livelihoods in Papua New Guinea: Synthesis of Official Assessments of the Large-

Scale Logging Industry”: Independent Forestry Reviews 2000-2005, Vol. 3. Available on-line at:

http://www.forest-trends.org/documents/publications/PNG2006/png.php

14

“Bitter debate over PNG logging” ABC Radio National, 6 February, 2004

Contemporary Chinese Community in PNG

122

Indonesian Chinese

Indonesian Chinese traders were present in PNG even before independence, no doubt

due to the fact that they share a common border. The two most prominent Indonesian

Chinese businesses in PNG today are the Papindo Trading Company and the SVS

group of companies.

Papindo (combining the words ‘PNG-Indonesia’) was founded by Soekandar

Chandra and his wife Susan. From humble small trader beginnings in the 1970s,

Papindo is now one of the largest wholesalers and owns a chain of supermarkets

across the country. Its headquarters is in Lae, PNG’s second largest town. Soekandar’s

expansion was no doubt aided by his taking up PNG citizenship, thus giving him

unrestricted movement as a ‘national’ business. In recent years he has moved into

property investment as well. Like RH, Soekandar has extensive political connections

and was awarded a knighthood in the early 2000s. SVS, or Super-Value-Store, is

another chain of wholesalers and supermarkets. It was started by an Indonesian

Chinese, Why Yu, who previously worked for Soekandar. After leaving Papindo to start

SVS in the 1990s, Why Yu later brought in his elder brother, Hidayat.

Another important Indonesian Chinese family is the Tseongs. The senior member of

the family, Sir James Tseong, is the chairman of Air Niugini, the government-owned

national airline. They are very influential and own a chain of businesses (supermarkets,

hardware, etc.) around their home territory of Vanimo and Wewak in PNG’s border

provinces near Indonesia. Apart from these groups, only a small number of other

Indonesian Chinese operate in PNG, mostly running small trading businesses.

Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese

The number of mainland Chinese in PNG has gone up dramatically in the past decade.

There are two main reasons for this. First, PNG is now the PRC’s most important South

Pacific trading partner, accounting for two-thirds of China's trade with the South Pacific

island nations. China’s thirst for raw materials to fuel its phenomenal economic growth

has made PNG’s vast untapped natural resources a priority object for the Chinese

government. Many Chinese State-owned enterprises (SOE) are investing heavily in

PNG. The Chinese government also considers PNG–China relations as a high priority

issue, given its suspicion that Taiwan is always looking for opportunities to redirect

diplomatic recognition from Beijing to Taipei via ‘dollar diplomacy’. In March 2008, for

instance, it was revealed that Taipei had spent USD20 million to try to secure diplomatic

relations with the Somare government.

15

Earlier, Taipei had tried the same thing with

the Skate government, again spending millions of dollars.

16

Second, in the past decade

there has been a huge increase in the number of mainland Chinese coming into the

country on work permits and operating small businesses.

The official PRC aid to PNG is extensive. Although it can be argued that it is

‘boomerang’ aid, as many of the contractors are Chinese SOEs, the PRC government

has nevertheless funded some high profile projects in recent times. These include the

Sir John Guise Sports Stadium (plus the cost of refurbishment), the Henganofi Rural

Housing Project, the Kandep Agricultural Research Centre Project, the Markham

National High School Project, donations to the health service (including supplying a

15

“PNG minister admits meeting middleman”, The China Post

(Taipei), 10 May 2008.

16

Taipei’s ‘dollar’ diplomacy is well known in the region and is a real threat given the unstable nature of many

South Pacific nations. For a broad overview see Graeme Dobell, “China and Taiwan in the South Pacific:

Diplomatic Chess versus Pacific Political Rugby,”

Chinese in the Pacific: Where to Now,

CSCSD Occasional

Paper Number 1, May 2007, at:

http://rspas.anu.edu.au/cscsd/occasional_papers/cscsd_op1_4_chapter_1.pdf

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dozen doctors) and the supply of military equipment to the PNG Defence Force. From

the late 1990s onwards, Chinese SOEs have also been making multi-million kina

investments. Among the biggest are: Timber and Logging (e.g., Fusen Industries (PNG)

Pty. Ltd; Heybridge Pty. Ltd; China Long Kong (PNG) Industry Pty. Ltd..), POM

Packaging (PNG) Pty. Ltd., PNG Salt Industries Ltd., China National Overseas

Engineering (PNG) Corporation (COVEC PNG) (mostly in roads and building

construction), BNBM PNG Pty. Ltd. (hardware and electrical wholesale) and Ramu

Nickel project. Total investments from these companies alone are worth more than

USD1.5 billion.

Outside these companies, a much larger number of Chinese come to PNG under

the work permit scheme. Under this scheme, expatriate employment is only approved

for professional positions on the condition that such positions will be localized once a

national is ready to take over. In practice, due to widespread corruption, almost anyone

can get a work permit by bribing an official. Where mainland Chinese are concerned,

many bribe officials from the PNG Embassy in Beijing meaning that, strictly speaking,

they are not ‘illegals’ as they hold a valid work permit.

17

Once they arrive in PNG, these work permit holders immediately start small trading

concerns, selling cheap Chinese consumer projects such as electronic goods and

clothes. Others establish ‘kai bars’ (fast food outlets) and Chinese restaurants. All these

businesses are illegal because such commercial activities are reserved for nationals.

The police have arrested and shut down more than a dozen kai bars but the number of

Chinese operated kai bars appear to be going up. Other illegal operations run by

mainland Chinese in include brothels

18

and money laundering. These Chinese are also

known to be involved in smuggling. Although there is no direct evidence of triad

activities, it is well known that one mainland Chinese who operates a Chinese

restaurant in Port Moresby tells members of the mainland Chinese community that he is

the triad representative for PNG. The same person even managed to sign up as a

reserved policeman for the PNG constabulary.

Because so many mainland Chinese are operating small businesses such as kai

bars, they are a very visible minority in all the major towns in PNG. Due to their inability

to speak English or Pidgin and their limited experience with nationals, conflicts between

these mainland Chinese and the local populations are not uncommon. During the

period 1999-2007 there were at least half-a-dozen killings of mainland Chinese by

disgruntled workers. The usual complaint was that the mainland Chinese treated them

harshly and had little cultural understanding of how to interact with nationals. The most

recent killing occurred in late May 2008, when a Chinese couple who operated a bakery

in Hohola settlement was brutally murdered.

Some Observations on the New Chinese

The first point to make is that they are probably the biggest beneficiary of the sell-off by

Europeans (white) business after the dramatic fall in value of the kina in the late 1990s.

As proprietors sought to leave the country, many such businesses were sold up quickly,

with owners keen to transfer their money out before the kina fell further. The people

willing to pay upfront and take over the businesses were usually the new Chinese.

Second, among the new Chinese, the Malaysian Chinese appear to have some

political ambitions. The RH group is a good example of a company that tries to

influence those in power. Part of the reason is that government support is needed for

17

“PNG: Foreign minister acknowledges corruption problem” , ABC Radio, 29 May 2007

18

The prostitutes brought into the country only serve the expatriate community. One well known brothel

operated out of the old Boroko Foodworld premise in Port Moresby.

Contemporary Chinese Community in PNG

124

their timber operations to run smoothly. Other Malaysian Chinese businessmen are not

as ambitious as RH but they too try to befriend local politicians in order to expand their

businesses. Unlike the PNG Chinese, most of the political links between the PNG

politicians and Malaysian businesses are hidden. Some Indonesian businessmen like

Soekandar expand their influence by using another route, taking up PNG citizenship.

Third, the new Chinese are the biggest investors outside the oil and gas sectors.

There is little doubt that new investments using foreign money (foreign direct

investments) come almost exclusively from the mainland Chinese and Malaysian

Chinese communities.

Fourth, apart from the SOEs, most mainland Chinese are investing in ‘reserved’

activities such as kai bars, bakeries, low end restaurants, and clothing stores that often

bring them into conflict with local residents and the authorities. This conflict only

increases corruption, as many of these operators pay off the police and immigration

authorities when they come to check on their illegal businesses.

Fifth, the biggest number of illegal Chinese undoubtedly comes from mainland

China. This, in part, reflects the quality of mainland migrants to PNG. Many of them are

poorly educated, lack big capital and do not posses any professional qualifications or

skills. Hence, they cannot officially obtain a work visa and thus can only get into PNG

illegally or by buying a fake work permit. Those who can afford it will pay to secure a

legitimate work permit.

Sixth, most of the Chinese groups (including the PNG Chinese) do not like the

mainland Chinese and see them as crooks and ‘conmen’ (see below). In part this is

because most of the new Chinese (other than RH) do not plan to stay in PNG in the

long term. Most of them are only interested in maximising their profits in PNG before

either going back to their homeland or, as many Chinese Malaysians and most of the

mainland Chinese prefer, moving to a third country. In this respect, favoured

destinations include Canada, Australia, the US, and New Zealand.

The “Old” Chinese

There are currently less than 1000 PNG-born Chinese living and working in the country.

They are sometimes called PNGBC (or PNG-born Chinese). The bulk of the locallyborn

Chinese community left for Australia in the 1970s, when they were offered

Australian citizenship when PNG became independent. Those who stayed behind were

mostly risk-takers, or feared they could not succeed commercially in Australia because

of its tight regulatory framework. Those who stayed in PNG had the advantage of

buying cheap assets from those departing and, in general, most of those who remained

did quite well economically.

The richest PNG Chinese today is arguably Sir Ling James Seeto. Based in Port

Moresby, Sir Ling is the majority owner of Lings Freezers and of Kwila Insurance. He is

also reputed to be the largest individual property owner in the country, and the major

beneficiary of the country’s property boom in the early-to-mid-2000s. Another wealthy

PNG Chinese family is the Seeto Kui, based in Lae. Their wealth is founded on

wholesale and supermarket operations, but they have also started moving into property.

A thrid prominent family is that of Sir Henry Chow. The Chow family, which owns the

Lae Biscuit Company and Neptune Fishing, has in recent times moved into oil palm

plantations and property development.

The usual strategy for these PNG Chinese is to have at least one family member

with PNG citizenship, which allows them to move freely in the PNG economy without

any restrictions. Even if an entire family is comprised of PNG nationals, it is almost

certain that the members also hold Australian permanent residencies. The biggest

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challenge facing these PNG-born Chinese is intergenerational continuity. Many of the

younger generation, who have spent years studying in Australia, do not want to go back

to PNG to run the family businesses. In addition to the lifestyle limitations due to the

breakdown in law-and-order, many younger PNG Chinese find it almost impossible to

meet ‘suitable’—that is, anyone of Chinese extraction—members of the opposite sex in

PNG. This is especially hard for men, as most eligible young single Chinese girls with a

PNG background are already living in Australia. Hence there are quite a number of

cases of PNG Chinese men marrying outside the community, with the largest number

probably marrying Filipinas. A sizeable number of young single Filipino women work in

PNG and they form the largest pool of available women. Most of these PNG Chinese

men would not consider marrying a national, for the most part because of the practical

consequences of such a marriage. PNG runs on a powerful ‘wantok’ system in which

relatives of all sorts feel entitled to make serious demands on each other. Once married

to a clan member, others in his or her clan can, and do, make demands on the new

spouse in terms of money, time or materials, demands to which saying ‘no’ is often not

an option.

The Relationship between the New Chinese and PNG-Born Chinese

Economically speaking, the PNG Chinese don’t like the newcomers, seeing them as

economic competitors who have not ‘paid their dues’ locally by spending generations in

PNG and getting to know the nationals intimately. Where companies are concerned,

they especially resent RH, on account the size of its business and its political influence.

Deep down inside, however, they know they have lost their economic battle. On a social

level, they get along well with Southeast Asian Chinese like the Malaysians,

Singaporeans and Indonesian Chinese and some younger PNG Chinese have married

Indonesian and Malaysian Chinese. Sir Henry Chow, one of the most prominent PNG

Chinese, is the Honorary Consul for Singapore.

The group that the PNG Chinese detest most is the mainland Chinese, whom they

characterise as ‘con men’ and ‘uncivilised’, which is the greatest insult in PNG. The

main reasons people give for this is that mainland Chinese have spoiled the previously

good relationship between the Chinese community and PNG nationals. People say that

before the coming of mainland Chinese PNG nationals never killed ethnic Chinese over

business affairs, but now they are stirring up trouble by competing with nationals in

small businesses like kai bars and small retail stores. People also complain that the

mainland Chinese are corrupting the system because they are involved in too much

smuggling and have set up a market in stolen goods.

As far as I can ascertain, most PNG-born Chinese do not see their future in PNG.

Their numbers are getting smaller and smaller. Their strategy is to make as much

money as possible and then move the profits out. The problem is that many of them

have fairly large assets that can only be sold to the new Chinese, including the

mainland Chinese, in large part because many of their businesses are structured in

such a way that it is almost impossible to sell to a European or national.

19

The favourite

relocation destination is properties in Australia. Although many complain about the high

cost of living in Australia and the difficulties of doing business there, most also think that

the move to Australia is inevitable as PNG will never be politically stable.

19

For example, I know of a real estate company operated by a PNG Chinese couple. He handles the rental

properties for other PNG Chinese who have moved down to Australia. This sort of business depends on

personal bonds which cannot be transferred to a new owner.

Contemporary Chinese Community in PNG

126

Conclusion and Outlook

The late 1990s arrival of the mainland Chinese in large numbers has altered the

perception of the nationals towards Chinese and Asians in general. Previously they

associated the Chinese community with logging and big businesses; now they

associate Chinese with low-end businesses like kai bars and other direct economic

competitors with nationals. This ill-will breeds suspicions, like the rumour that these kai

bar owners sell nationals substandard food deemed unfit for human consumption, as

one newspaper actually reported in regard to lamb meat imported from Australia. The

negative perception is further reinforced by the illegal activities of the mainlanders.

There are growing calls for the government to act against mainland Chinese

traders. The problem is that the bureaucracy (including the police) is so inefficient and

corrupt that any actions it takes against these illegal operators are likely to be useless,

or at best temporary in nature. Even if the people involved are deported, chances are

they will return under a different passport and name, with a new work permit. The

increasing physical attacks against the mainland Chinese, in particular petty traders and

kai bar operators, seems likely therefore to increase. These Chinese deal with the

nationals every day, so the potential for conflict and misunderstanding is high, with

disagreements more often than not resulting in petty violence.

In the medium term (over the next decade), one can predict that the mainland

Chinese will take over the roles played by RH and the wealthy PNG Chinese. The

weight of mainland Chinese numbers and the important economic role played by

Chinese SOEs means that they will soon dominate the sections of the PNG’s economy

that used to be occupied by the old PNG Chinese and Southeast Asian Chinese. Given

this prospect, it is also likely that companies such as RH and the key PNG Chinese will

form partnerships with mainland companies in order to expand their business and

protect their investments.

And, finally, it is almost certain that Chinese triads will establish a presence in PNG

if there is big money among the mainland Chinese community.

But despite the various criticisms and complaints directed at the ‘new’ Chinese, I

want to conclude by arguing that without them there would be no new investments in

PNG. No one else has the necessary appetite for risk. The traditional sources of capital,

Australia and ‘white’ companies in general, have basically pulled out of PNG, with big

investment projects such as the proposed gas pipeline an exception to the rule. More

often than not, large investments derive from the capital of Chinese newcomers and, on

balance, these investments have contributed positively to the PNG economy.

Backpedaling

 

Great moments in prime ministerial irony

Noblesse does not oblige

(This is a paper I spoke at a Pacific Economic Bulletin (Crawford School of Economics, ANU) roadshow in Alotau, Goroka, and the Madang recently, following a paper on corruption by Peter Lamour.)

Professor Lamour's paper on perceptions of corruption, along with a recent Transparency International report on the same for PNG, form a counterpoint to what I want to talk about here, which might be called predisposition to corruption, or better--perceptions of PNG's predisposition to corruption. One of the assumptions often made in global surveys of corruption is that  Melanesian gift cultures are predisposed to corruption.  The reference is to Marcel Mauss treatise on The Gift, which talks about Melanesian exchange as different by degree from barter or quid pro quo models. The wantokism, the gifts that  build ties between families and individuals, and build trade partnerships that run over generations, are fundamentally different from market economics, as we know. But the perception is that they are vulnerable to becoming palm-greasing, self-aggrandizing gestures. Are they?

I want to talk about something more specific to the highlands, which is incremental exchange. It is this system, which people often gloss to characterize all of PNG's exchange,  that has been called 'pre-adapted' to capitalism (by Ben Finney, among others). Take the moka: I give you two pigs, you return three sometime later on. It's an investment. Leaving aside the social aspects of moka and tee, these are most like a market economy, and have been the vehicle for famous success stories, especially here in Goroka, where we used to see Harry Gotoha, that haus boi-cum-millionaire, walking barefoot in the market and talking to one of the earliest satellite phones--- liked to think to his broker in Sydney. These systems of material and social investment rely on the singular role of the highlands big man, the person who charms, persuades, strong arms and sometimes intimidates his clansmen into buying into his personal vision.

Charismatic entrepreneurs.

They look a lot like certain characters peopling the Christian Bookstores across PNG these days. Charismatic entrepreneurs.  These celebrity pastors include, for examples, Kenneth Copeland (author of Managing Gods Mutual Funds), his wife Gloria Copeland (who wrote No deposit, no return), Tim deLay (of the Left behind books and their protagonist Robert Redford lookalike Rayford Steele, leader of the Tribulation Force Commandoes), Kenneth Hagen, Joyce Meyer, Benny Hinn, Robert Tilton, Joel Osteen, Marilyn Hickey, and Pat Robertson, to name a few .

A new wave of books, tapes, curricula and crusades espouse something called prosperity theology, or the the Prosperity Gospel, the Health and Wealth Ministries, the Name it and Claim it Doctrine, Signs and Wonders, New Life, Third Wave evangelism, the Latter Rain Third Wave Movement, Theology of the Spoken Word, or Faith Preaching.  These are new doctrines that traffic in a particular form of apocalytpic fear, a vision of the imminent rapture when only a few of us will really make god's cut for a heavenly paradise. The rest of us will be left behind. Unraptured. Unrepentent. Unprosperous.

These theologies are all about wealth creation, attraction, supplication and enjoyment. They espouse a form of biblical literalism that rests on the book of revelations, and also rests on passages like Deuteronomy 8:18 which says, 'God gives you the power to get wealth to establish his covenant.'

It is God's will for you to prosper—and that does not refer to a garden harvest. The message is that wealth is crucial to these days just prior to the end time (and of course the global economic crisis may be a sign of their imminence). Get rich now, or risk being left behind.

A RaptureReady website tells us: “After the rapture takes place, everyone left behind will know someone who was mysteriously taken away.” That sounds like PNG, doesn’t it? Samting blong ples.  Samting bilong Stark Trek. A whole range of merchandise now serves the rapture ready community including things like bumper stickers that tell you 'In case of rapture this car will be unmanned.' That's going to be a big problem alons the Poreporena Freeway when the time comes.

Charming, over-coiffed, shiny suited and enthusiastic, these preachers are not so different from classic bigmen, deftly able to subsume your desires to their own ambitions. Picture Benny Hinn pacing the singsing ground with handless mic, declaiming his enemies—the Pope, the Jews, the one world conspiracy, and most of all an empty wallet---and he draws us into his church of new riches. We can enjoy the bounty of a life in Christ here on this earth, without guilt, without shame, because, as so many of these ministries teach us, Jesus wasn’t poor after all, and so why should we be? The important point is that we must be free to make money so as to become generous to the church. Pastor Smith Wigglesworth (his real name!) tells us that “Yahweh has prospered individuals by making them millionares and even billionaires in order that the money be used to meet the needs of His people.” Joyce Meyer makes $100 million a year, for example, which makes her amongst the most rewarded of Gods spokespersons.

Free markets for the holy rollers. The excitement of unregulated markets, of fundamentalist capitalism, is what attracts Pastor Ted Haggart , who has said it is “time to harness the forces off free-markets in our ministry.'  Remember Ted? He was George Bush's pastor before being outed by a male prostitute drug dealer who had been holy rolling with the righteous one.

On one level, all developing countries are all pre-adapted to corruption. There is a kind of petty corruption the greases the wheels of any dysfunctional state, any imperfect cash economy. A line item here, a favour extended there. But this is still public service.

Prosperity theology recalibrates this petty stuff to a truly different order of reciprocity and reward, which is why so many prominent Papua New Guineans have found it attractive, not just as followers, but as sponsors.

Money Rain, U-Vistract, Papalain, Windfall, Hosava all take a page from these books. Windfall was a grassroots Investment and Management Company. Paplain was a compensation scheme for forestry workers, moving through Lutheran and Pentecostal circles; SDA church members were big on Lifetime Benefit Scheme where a special bank card was issued for drawing money from the fund; and Money Rain moved through the Christian Life Centre in  Port Moresby. The Clerk of Parliament invested 300,000 kina of public funds in money rain. The Secretary of Finance was said to have invested a similar amount of public monies in the Assembles of God Jubilee University. The 2001 SDA crusade of Mark Finley in Port Moresby supported by a k100,000 national government grant, during which Minister for Lands John Pundari pronounced that PNG would be richly blessed by God's abundant grace (in return?)

The most successful of such cross-marketing schemes has to be the pre-millenium Benny Hinn crusade in Port Moresby when PM Bill Skate and Treasurer Iario Lasaro jumped aboard with a k180,000 contribution, in return for which Hinn declared, “The Prime Minister of this country is none other than Jesus Christ and I am his ambassador.”

Again, bigmen harnessing our resources for their personal ambitions. But without the same guarantee of returns that we have in moka or tee.

This all looks suspiciously like the free market development theory that grew so very popular by the early 2000's with Jeffrey Sachs, Amartya Sen (development as freedom, free markets equal free people, etc) and of course Peruvian Hernando De Soto, darling of the World Bank's efforts to get PN to harness the hidden capital in customary land, by selling it.

Recall, though, that there is a history of little Grameen bank projects in the highlands that predate all of this, like the Wok Meri Scheme in Chuave. These evolved from a number of post-Independent development cooperatives, not all of which survived to prosper, but which include the Kabiswali Movement in MilneBay nd the Dabsau Movement in Madang, for examples. 

But there is a big difference between well-meaning cooperatives and  pyramid or Ponzi schemes. Ponzi schemes have been made famous recently by Bernie Madoff, the investment banker who never made an investment, and kept paying off one investor with another's millions, until finally, the jig was up and the scores of self-assuredly zillionaire clients were suddenly penniless overnight.

The difference may be that when Noah Misingku could not make good to his U-Vistract investors, and promised the World Bank would bail them out, people continued to believe  well past his police confession. Pyramid schemes are based on faith---and always on the sterling reputations of the first people in, who can truthfully testify to getting a 500% return.  Today, though, while there may be many Madoff investors who will not admit to selling their Gulfstream (perhaps to the PM's Department?), they are not waiting for Madoff to make good. But along the Sepik the War  Carrier's Association still claims victims, as people purchase eir neighbours compensation vouchers in the belief that someday the Japanese government will pay out millions to the veterans' descendants.

 

If you live only partially on the cash economy, and if you have been starved of government services all your life, you are supremely vulnerable. From this perspective, all development, and especially donor aided development, can look like one great Ponzi scheme, where the trickle never quite comes down to the last stakeholders.  Whoever said money cant buy happiness clearly had too much of the stuff.  Free market ministries, free market development theory, lassaiz faire theology—are all products of the advanced capital moment that was then, and is certainly not now. 

Because highlanders are 'pre-adapted' to profit does not mean they are pre-adapted to grift.  We must make a distinction between trickle-down blessings from the lord and what is thinly veiled Social Darwinism for the twenty first century. Poor people, in other wors, are no more damned than Bernie Madoff's clients were briefly blessed.

Most of PNG lives with a feint grasp on the cash economy, so the basis of any good life is the persistence of customary land tenure, whatever Hernando de Soto says about Peru. Few people in PNG would agree that living on money---which amounts to roughly K80 a fortnight for most of us—is worth cashing in the heirloom of traditional land. Poverty is not part of a Divine Wrath Program, and subsistence farmers in Western countries, like subsistence fishermen in Egum Atoll, are no less beloved than Benny Hinn or Bill Gates, any more than they are 'poor' --the the real sense of that word--for a lack of cash. But if we do rush headlong into the Rapture with U-Vistract vouchers and receipts for our registered land, even--mind you--Carbon Credit receipts as they are being touted today--we may get beamed up to the righteous beyond, but we will surely leave the real paradise far behind.

Kawawar for today's bad magic

I was asked to open a workshop for the police on sorcery last month, but the event was cancelled (although not before I spent the scheduled morning chasing from one police station to the next in search of it). So Im posting a draft of my talk here, sort of like planting a bit of preventive ginger (kawowar) before the spell. And now I jump in just after the flowery introductions. To begin, I would say it is easy to get caught up in definitions between what is sorcery and what is witchcraft---this seems to keep academics in business for years. For my purposes I would say that we have two main types: poison, or sympathetic magic, which can include marila or love magic, in which nail clippings, hair, food scraps and so forth can be used to cast a spell on someone at a distance. This category hasn’t. fortunately, been much expanded in a modern world so we can share biros, silverware, cold drinks and even seats without much worry still. 

Highlandsmedics sometimes treat sorcery caused by poisons with emetics and laxatives—as functional equivalents of traditional medicines. Pangia call this tomo, and it also includes a marila component that women may give men and vice versa. This kind of illness involves stomach upsets of mild nature, and can be treated with vomiting. Then leavings sorcery is sympathetic magic. We always discard all our leavings to prevent sorcery---food gets thrown into water. These cures are more investigative, like CID event, and nothing to do with hospital.

The Manam people accuse women of marila, a supernatural pulling power. But sanguma is men’s work in Manam, and is very serious and mainly fatal, so of an entirely different order. This involves an expert sorcerer, in most cases someone who has been trained in the vocation, and traditional (not so long ago) an initiation which would require him (mostly him) to kill his first child and thus subsume that power unto himself. This is typical of the north coast and Sepik all the way to the Siassi and Huon Peninsula.

When Madang people talk about sorcery they are talking about this, and in present day they are also talking about specialists coming from, say, Bagasin, and new forms migrating from Bogia, for example that involves the sanguma man coming to you while you sleep, slitting your throat and thus making you unable to speak. People also say Raikos is filled with sanguma, whereas Madang proper is less so.

 

Sometimes you can put kawowar around a house to transform the sanguma man from invisible to a visible being at night, so you can defend yourself. Sorcerers can also waylay a victim and transfix them. They can hunt people down, for example, find a woman in her garden and copulate with her, then kill her and take her heart out. Or the kidneys are pulled out ---one may be placed in the victims mouth, and the person’s insides are said to be stuffed with leaves. He or she is sent home after being sewn up magically, and is told to cook and eat the kidney. Or the victim is given amnesia of the event, or perhaps only told the date when they will die. He/she may be left in a zombie like state that relatives are powerless to interfere in, and die without medical care.

Raikos sangumaman use pigs, dogs and black ants as their cover. The Bagasin use flying kokomos at night. InWestern Province a slightly different thing occurs, a combination of sorcery and sympathetic magic. A victim is caught with the help of an unwitting third party, usually a relative, who can provide droppings, the smoke or hair of the target without knowing it. But then when the victim dies, the third person also suffers torments by the spirit of the deceased—a prolonged illness, weight loss, mental problems, physical decaying is some cases, or more direct pain and communication with spirits. As a result, people with classic symptoms of HV/AIDs these days are mistaken for those who may have had a hand in sorcelling someone else.

 

The direct effects of sorcery are no more heinous and unjust sometimes than the indirect ones, as, for example, when a bereaved parent gets blamed for his child’s death because of some land dispute, or something he himself has done, unwittingly. This happened after the death of one of our most beloved staff and ex-student, Joe Rainbubu, who died, say the medical records, of leukemia (after they were amended from saying 'anaemia'), and who was said to have died of sorcery revenge after a land dispute in his home at Sissano Lagoon; thus his father was made doubly bereft by the thought that he had called Joe home to help settle the dispute.

What people like Linus Digim'rina, the Head of the Anthropology Dept at UPNG, and a Trobriander, suggests is that we look at the effects and not the causes, that we walk backward from the tragedy of a primary or secondary death (an original victim or an accused sorcerer who has been hurt). Tell us what happened---was it physical harm inflicted by someone, or not? --before saying the 's' word.

Some of the worst tragedies come from rumours and witch hunts, where self-appointed jurors and judges hound a suspect to ruin, sometimes even self-harm. If the original sorcerer has not confessed, he or she may be targeted for death by counter-sorcery, or killed by an act of collective bloodlust, or, more likely, enveloped by shame. Signs of weakness or empathy in mourning can also suggest sorcery, or complicity in sorcery, like a father who weeps too dramatically--and some might say is anguished by guilt.

There are two issues here: whether sorcery has been the cause of an original calamity, and whether a second calamity can be vindicated as payback for sorcery. The first is especially hard to confirm, and the second becomes a matter of restorative justice. It really doesn’t matter what someone’s objectives are, if they perform acts that are legal and have no direct bearing on someone’s well-being, it remains a matter of faith only that they have committed sorcery or witchcraft. If I pray for rain, by the same token, and it rains, you can berate me, you can suspect and even shun me, but you cannot convict me of anything [citation].

But when people admit to a crime, they must be investigated, and when it becomes clear that he or she did cause physical harm, illness or death, then a crime has been committed entirely independent of the act of sorcery. Whatever the social outcome of the crime---if it allows peace or relives strain in a community—it is still a crime and must be treated as such.

We live in a country where restorative justice is most effective, and therefore people everywhere continue to justify sorcery/sanguma/poison in terms of the betterment of the community. But this runs counter to western jurisprudence, and it is becoming far-fetched to see PNG communities as autonomous entities anymore---they are cast out across the country as people from one language move and work everywhere else, and their borders grow porous as daughters move in with their husbands and men marry women from elsewhere, not to mention development projects bring migrants right into your lap. We now have Kerema and Tolai and Sepik people in one compound in the settlements, even here in Madang, breeding new ideas about sorcery and competing in different ways with this instrument of social control—which is magic—to define the larger community.

More importantly, women are more often the victims of restorative justice than they are the beneficiaries, as anyone in village court will tell you. They are martyrs to the peace of a community they only married into. And the first ones to be named as cause when things go bad.

Sorcery is a social regulator, the original form of jurisprudence. For fear of sorcery people gag themselves, stay inline, and most importantly in today’s PNG, fear success for the jealousy it inspires. All of us everywhere have at one time or another said about him or her that he’s courting revenge by being so bigheaded. And by that we don’t mean a verbal reprimand, we mean samting blong ples. And when his wife, her son, or their pig dies, we smile smugly, and feel like saying I told you so.

But increasingly if we hear that someone has put samting blong ples on this person, we are shocked, and saddened. We know he or she worked hard for that car, or loved their child, and was not deliberately courting bad luck for wanting to get ahead.

We can talk about the many reasons sorcery is on the rise---terrible infrastructure and even worse health services, new diseases with unknown symptoms, greater mobility and exposure to other diseases, not to mention fears and prejudices against others, etc. A mushroom of social change which allows enormous variety of behaviors that never existed before and suddenly may be considered to attract sorcery. A rise in ‘blame the victim’ mentality as these behaviors come to confuse us. Breakdown of taboos so that men and women eat together, step over each others things, and even touch each other in wholly unprecedented ways---in public. Emergence of social classes, so that the village wife and the husband’s female colleague are now, more than ever before, from two very different worlds, and where jealousy is an everyday, sometimes uncontrollable experience, especially when we hear about people getting rich by kickbacks and palm greasing and simply being in the right place at the right time. Laki! Makes me un-laki!

But to be clear: I can whinge that she has stolen my boyfriend, but if I stab her with a knife I am guilty of a crime. If I engage a known sangumaman or poisonman to make her sick or ugly or turn her head away from him, I am guilty of what? It’s hard to say. If I engage the same poisonman to make a marila to bring my boyfriend back, I am not guilty either, am I? But if I do so and it causes his new girlfriend to commit suicide, or causes him to recklessly swim the strait and drown, in an effort to reach me, you might say Im guilty. Or liable to some degree. But what if I engage a sagumaman to kill my rival, and she does die in he sleep, the doctors say of a heart attack (she was a fat highlander who ate too many lamb flaps anyway), and if the police find this sangumaman and he confesses to the crime but supplies absolutely no details, and her body lacks any marks whatsoever, can he be indicted? Can I be? Is intent to kill the same as murder? In law, it is not. I suggest that unless we have physical evidence of the act, or overwhelming circumstantial evidence (according to the normal scale of jurisprudence), we cannot indict. The effort must be effect-based, not cause-based. I hate many people, and I may find myself dreaming of their delicious deaths, but that makes me mean, not murderous.

Highlands poisons have been enhanced by modernity, where vague potions can be substituted with bateri---battery acid—and other botol, or glass pieces/shards---can be put into food. Botol was originally from Bundi---and Botoltom (specialists) put glass shards in a body to have them taken out by a price. Specialists from previously neighbouring peoples have come to make their appearance as agents of harm in towns today. Madang people talk about the new Bogia sorceries, for example.

It has never been effective to merely legislate against sorcery. Even after the famous witchcraft trials of the early 18th century inEngland, when the courts finally drafted a witchcraft law, they had to ask---how do we legislate against flying? Here we might ask, how do we make a law that says people cannot turn invisible and go moving around at night?

Sorcery will not end without an intellectual revolution. Kowowar must come to stand for more than a ginger antidote, or talisman, but biomedical facts. Focus on symptoms not labels, and learn about the medical pluralism across PNG. There are extreme differences in regimes of treatment, and what looks like sorcery here may be healing there. Or in both instances. Humoral systems strive for balance. Dual systems of bodily substance usually contrast blood and grease, rad and white, etc—as for the Huli. Tripartate systems include blood, grease and bone---for the Duna, e.g. The vital components in highlands medical systems are breath, thoughts, knowledge, spirits. Illnesses can be attributed to fright (spirit leaves temporarily), desire (jealousy), sorrow, anger (ancestral spirits), spite (sorcery).

Lack of social services, lack of schools, the rise of HIV/AIDs, high infant mortality, all are primary causes of today's mysterious deaths. Dysentery in the highlands once also gave rise to witchcraft accusations. Bun nating people have always been considered sick, and fat people healthy. Suppressed anger will cause sickness, by some beliefs (even for people who dont watch Oprah). Nothing causes anger more predictably in PNG than a spouse, and so marriage becomes an excellent precondition for illness and/or sorcery.

 

Interestingly, it is thought that the soul-capturing version of sanguma can never be cured by western medicine, but women in mun sik (menstruation) are immune.

The problem is with illnesses that are neurological-- epilepsy, fever and fits, the sort of thing that comes on fast. Ritual cures are almost always considered the only way, and these usually involve fertility issues with women---where (no surprise) they become the object of a social logjam---being barren). Purification becomes a form of peacemaking. In Pangia it was thought that menstrual blood covertly placed in a man’s food could cause an ectopic pregnancy (in the man!) and death of that fetus because it had no vagina to exit.

So a woman could be demonized at any stage of her child-bearing life, even if sanguma itself did not affect her during menstruation. By now, everyone in PNG is aware that women have been stoned, raped, burned or buried alive---not to mention dragged behind vehicles---for suspicion of being a witch. Only a clear understanding of biomedicine will bring women the same rights as men in confronting sorcery accusations. A thorough understanding of biomedical facts, and the nature of Mendelian biology will help alleviate some of the demonization of women’s biology.

But the rise of sorcery is also a reflection of social dis-ease, and as many lowlanders will attest, such crises of social change, anxiety over illness or external threats, have been treated by great social rituals in the past, the best of which is now long deceased, and was called the Devilfish in Lumi. A big female masalai figure who ingests the troubled or ill person, the sorcelled one, and then gives birth to a healed person, thanks to the ritual contributions of everyone.

What was he thinking? From the annals of adventure travel

What is it with Americans who travel the world only to break local laws? John Yettaw travels to Burma and decides to swim the lake behind Aung San Suu Kyi’s house, just to say hello; and in the aftermath of this reckless act the military junta may find an excuse to indefinitely prolong the democracy leader’s house arrest. It is one thing to map out a strategy for civil disobedience as a means of drawing attention to a cause, and another thing to impetuously follow your dream in another country, within a fraught political environment. Did he imagine this larkish adventure would result in goodwill all around? That Aung San needed his company? That the military junta would ignore this as misguided (unguided) adventure tourism?

 

I ask these questions because our company recently hosted a photo team from National geographic into a very socially and politically sensitive situation, and trusting (naively) that the magazine would understand our oft-repeated concerns, especially after we vetoed a travel writer for the project who had actually been fired from the New York Times for making up characters in his stories, we were sent another adventure writer whose ‘cultural sensitivity’ was said to be impeccable. Ultimately, we almost came to fisticuffs with the man who insisted he trek on his own to make a form of first contact with the subject group, against our very clear instructions that this would frighten them unnecessarily, and the expressed concerns of his self-appointed guide who told me he did not know how to look after a white man---did he have to take him along?

 

Apparently, yes. Because if an American wants to do something slightly illicit, he considers it his obligation to do so, without jural or social constraints. Especially if he (and I say ‘he’ advisedly) has an audience to report to. What I should have done, and wholly regret not doing, was read some of this writer’s ‘award winning’ travel writing, including a piece about eluding state officials in Burma so that he may get beyond the barriers of ordinary tourism. So that, to be clear, he can pursue an obsession with a WWII-era jungle road despite the current civil unrest and the fact that it is closed to foreigners.

 

Such is the state of the old adventure-lit genre that it sometimes looks like the participant-observation of anthropology, and almost always co-ops the research of anthropologists to describe ambient rapport as if it were without translators or state of the art gear and satellite phone. Adventurous locations everywhere boast a small industry of people (and I have unwittingly become one of them) exist to escort such visitors beyond the pale, to impress his or her feet in the sand were no one else has dared to tread, and thus prove that he/she is not bound by the laws of a State that is either too young or too oppressive for their taste; that government everywhere are anathema to real adventure; and the people who live beyond the footprint of a global communications network are well and truly deserving of this contact---it cannot be denied! Like laptops/celphones/IT technology  for everyone, we demand there be journalists for everyone, especially hardy male American adventure travel writers who dare the midnight swim in Burma, and dismiss the consequences as all publicity being good publicity for dear Aung San, who, after all, must have yearned for such good company and the tales of adventure travel he could tell. You have to wonder what that first night was like.

Stinkyjournalism's post on Jared Diamond

  

 The Pig in a Garden: Jared Diamond and The New Yorker series:

Art Science Research Laboratory's StinkyJournalism.org and SavageMinds.org is simultaneously cross-publishing on both web sites, a series of essays on the controversy surrounding Jared Diamond's New Yorker article, "Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance is Ours." The essay series titled,The Pig in a Garden: Jared Diamond and The New Yorker, is written by ethics scholars in the fields of anthropology and communications, as well as journalists, environmental scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists et al., and edited by Rhonda Roland Shearer, Alan Bisbort and Sam Eifling. Each contributor's mission was simple: To examine Jared Diamond's article, and The New Yorker's decision to publish it, through the lens of their own discipline. We think you will agree that these issues will not soon be put to rest. As Nancy Sullivan writes in her contribution, part of the reason for this series is to reclaim some of the ground among general readers lost to "experts" like Jared Diamond. With tis series, StinkyJournalism.org and SavageMinds.org seek to capture that wider general audience for writings about anthropology. Sullivan's essay is first in the series.

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I am an anthropologist who has lived in Papua New Guinea (PNG) for more than twenty years, most of these in the highlands. In 2002 I also taught a course in PNG war and peace, so the concept of Melanesian vengeance is not unfamiliar to me, either personally or academically. My understanding of Jared Diamond’s point in the piece “Vengeance is Ours” is that revenge is natural. It’s a Hobbesian message for the twenty-first century: humans are hardwired for revenge and require a social contract to prevent madness and mayhem. Savages are rational, because they also have rules to obey and urges to forfeit for the greater peace. But because tribes are such small units, Diamond seems to say, their rules lie closer to the human impulse.
 
Apparently the Melanesian social contract is somewhat thinner than the European one, superficially veiling the urge for revenge and permitting its satisfaction in controlled acts of  “payback.” People like Daniel Wemp, for example, live but a step away from the pre-Leviathan Eden, where all men were islands and under no social constraints. Diamond invites us to see the difference between Wemp’s smug vendetta and the lifelong frustrations of Diamond’s father-in-law, who could never experience revenge for his family’s murder during the Holocaust. The modern state fully thwarts our urge, whereas tribal edicts do not -- presumably even tribal societies within the state of Papua New Guinea. In an interesting anti-sentimental twist, Diamond also tells us that tribal people are ultimately happy to submit to a state apparatus, if only to be freed at last from the cycle of violence and payback.

If indeed Papua New Guineans are so eager to throw off the shackles of tribalism and finally live in peace, Daniel Wemp can now thank Diamond and The New Yorker for alerting the state apparatus of his crimes.

No one will ever find ‘Daniel Wemp’

I want to make three points here. First, that Diamond has seriously endangered this subject, whom he identifies by real first and last name, by claiming his responsibility for a series of murders. Beyond the Nipa tribe and the Southern Highlands Province is a thoroughly modern state of Papua New Guineafor which these acts constitute murder.

The second point follows from the first. The field of anthropology has a code of ethics that includes “informed consent” -- a not-incidental notion that if you use people for research purposes, they must know the risk involved, the nature of the project, how the data will be used, and how it will be publicized. In short, they should have the choice to remain anonymous. In a pinch, when these conditions cannot be met, you have to mask the subject’s identity.

But we know that Diamond’s piece does not actually come from the “annals of anthropology,” or at least not professional anthropology. That field has a distinct method, something called the ethnographic method, coined by Brownislaw Malinowski in ew Guineaninety years ago to prod the discipline out of the armchair and into the field for a minimally required period of time.

Informed consent has been an important topic to anthropology since Margaret Mead sat down for a chat with young women in Samoa(and Derek Freeman told us she got it wrong). But none of us would be discussing this now if it hadn’t been for Mead’s savvy decision to publish her first book with William Morrow, for a general audience, and thus bring cultural relativism into living rooms across the English-speaking world. Americans were especially blessed by her Redbook columns, where we learned that childhood, adolescence and even gender roles are not, as had been imagined, biologically determined. It was Mead who first taught the wider public about the tenaciousness of culture.

But it is our fault as anthropologists that no one has picked up the ball Mead dropped, and produced enough popular cultural anthropology in recent years. Jared Diamond is just filling the vacuum we left. No one seems to realize anymore that the field is not about making generalizations about humankind, but about describing the defining differences between cultures. It is not about expanding biological knowledge, nor defining the line between culture and biology, but about understanding the diversities of what is manmade, what is not natural after all. Anthropology teaches us about the power of world views.   

Diamond has been fantastically successful at bypassing particulars for the single European worldview of history, a worldview that professes to treat all societies with equal respect, but which, in fact, takes a remarkably Victorian approach to culture. Much like armchair anthropology, Diamond’s anecdotal evidence of other peoples is used to support an evolutionary view of culture, where social progress and moral growth bring us to a somewhat imperfect (but more advanced) present. We miss the idyll of a tribal past, but we are too sophisticated now to ever return.

Though we might wonder how Daniel’s society came to revel in killing, ethnographic studies of traditional human societies lying largely outside the control of state government have shown that war, murder, and demonetization of neighbors have been the norm. Modern state societies rate as exceptional by the standards of human history, because we instead grow up learning a universal code of morality that is constantly hammered into us: promulgated every week in our churches and codified in our laws. But the differences between the norms of states and of Handa clan society are not actually so sharp. In times of war, even modern state societies quickly turn the enemy into a dehumanized figure of hatred, only to enjoin us to stop hating again as soon as a peace treaty is signed.

There are whiffs of L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Campbell, and even Jeffrey Sachs to this logic. Great masters of the sonorous single narrative, by which all manner of irritating complexities are put to rest. In the end, dear readers, it's a small world after all.

Excess and restraint

This brings me to my third point. Diamond gets it wrong. Any thesis based on Melanesian justice as being retributive in the Western sense is absolutely wrong. It is solipsistic simplification. 

Anthropologists most frequently define groups and their borders by whom they fight. There has been a long history of anthropologists studying conflict in Melanesias a means of describing group identity, governance, and the social contract that is community. C.H. Wedgewood made the first stab at synthesizing this material in 1930, arguing that warfare in Oceaniaserves to integrate and knit together a community by defining the enemy – the Other. But the watershed years for studies of warfare in Papua New Guinea (PNG) really were the 1970s, when a cadre of anthropologists produced seminal ethnographies on the causes, forms and function of violence, especially across the highlands (see Barth 1975, Berndt 1971, Brown 1978, Hallpike 1977, Koch 1974, Meggitt 1977; Scaglion 1979, Schieffelin 1979, Sillitoe 1978, Strathern 1977, Vayda 1976, e.g.).

The triggers and causes of inter-tribal conflicts are never the same. Any pretext can initiate a fight, but this may be only a superficial altercation. It is the older, submerged reasons that make the blood boil and really sustain a war. Only the most assiduous research can tease these out of the gossip, bragging, historicizing and campaigning that surround warfare everywhere. Ronald Berndt’s 1962 classic of highlands warfare, Excess and Restraint, is more about excess than it is about restraint, seeming to imply that there are far more fights than strategies for keeping peace. Similarly, Ryan’s 1959 work on the Mendi (near Daniel Wemp’s region) calls inter-clan fighting volatile and chronic (1959: 268), and Glasse (1959) says the nearby Huli are hell-bent on continuous war. It can all look pretty rogue and bloodthirsty from the outside – like Homo sapiens in some pre-modern state of self-interest. But none of these writers would suggest that this is the whole story.

In the words of one Melanesian expert:

"[N]o worthwhile comment can be made on the cause of a particular [inter-clan] clash without inside knowledge of the longterm relationship between the contesting parties, or about the bearing group memories have on the conflict. Empirical accounts of the formal procedures, frequency, weaponry, and strategy of war, what is more, have only partial value in explaining conflict if little can be said about consciousness and underlying beliefs. There is no better introduction to this cognitive side to the matter than through analyzing notions of revenge. Killing was not carried out for the sheer love of it; it was virtually always an act to repay or satisfy some material grievance. But vengeance against enemies, in particular, was almost invariably backed up by appeals to legitimacy. Whether taken at the socially acceptable moment or not, it was normally sanctioned by those helping, perhaps paying the killed, or by those sharing the drive to assuage the sense of loss in ongoing 'revenge warfare' (Trompf 1994: 28-9)."

Even when war attracts hotheads and loose cannons (and Diamond tells us “The New Guinea Highlands are full of aggressive men seeking revenge for their own reasons”), and even when warriors seek unsanctioned revenge, there is still the distinction between legal and illegal bloodshed. Violence must have social legitimacy greater than one’s own personal ambitions. It is hard to glean whether Diamond knows this or not from comments like the following:

"Daniel was proud both of the aggressiveness displayed by all the warring clans of his Nipa tribe and of their faultless recall of debts and grievances. He likened Nipa people to 'light elephants' ": As Diamond quotes him in his New Yorker article, "They remember what happened thirty years ago, and their words continue to float in the air. The way that we come to understand things in life is by telling stories, like the stories I am telling you now, and like all the stories that grandfathers tell their grandchildren about their relatives who must be avenged. We also come to understand things in life by fighting on the battlefield along with our fellow-clansmen and allies.”

Berndt also recounts some of the most fantastic and improbable boasts of war (see Knauft 1999: 118).

If Diamond would have us understand that a revenge culture in highlands PNG is also rule-bound and rational, closer to a Babylonian law or the Torah than a modern state, we must also assume that it cultivates a system of punishment intended to end a conflict. This is consistent with an evolutionary view of culture in general, where an eye for an eye emerged in response to the endless personal vendettas posing a threat to the social fabric. In the earliest forms of statehood, defining tit for tat was a means of finishing warfare rather than perpetuating it. But again, listen to the highlands experts. Glasse says of the Huli that they have no idea of lex talionis. A man tries to inflict a greater injury than that which he has suffered. Moreover, the people who suffer as a result of vengeance do not accept their injuries as just or appropriate; they too seek counter-vengeance, and the conflict is unending (1968: 68).

This is precisely why there are so any young highlands men willing to do battle. As Glasse tells us, “nearly every [Huli] man nurses a grievance that can precipitate war” (Ibid: 88).

Revenge in the Western sense simply does not exist in the highlands of New Guinea. Outsiders are constantly left dumbfounded by the open-endedness of the system. But the Melanesian worldview is no simple subject to tackle, even for battle-hardened anthropologists. Payback killings and apparently indiscriminate acts of revenge are as common as prodigious (even self-destructive) acts of generosity, gifts without promise of comparable return, and infinite strategies of deflecting blame. None of these conundrums is separable in a Melanesian worldview.

Behind the Melanesian pidgin term "bekim" (payback) lies the presumption that life, punctuated by dangerous feuding and competitions, colored by the excitement of reciprocities and trade, is to be apprehended as a continuous interweaving of gains and losses, giving and taking, wealth and destitution, joy and sorrow, vitality and death (Trompf op cit:1).

Smoke in the Hills, Gunfire in the Valley

Rosita Henry has a particularly apt 2005 Oceania article  (Henry 2005) by this title about the Nebilyer fight in the Western Highlandsthat broke out in 1990 and ran for almost a decade. It also serves to illustrate Trompf’s point above, about the inevitability of violence as part of – not a rent in – the social fabric. Outsiders know the Nebilyer war from Connolly and Anderson’s third film in the First Contact trilogy of films, Black Harvest, which was shot while the couple lived  on Joe Leahy’s plantation and bore witness to the opening salvos of the fight. I would assume Diamond himself is familiar with the film. Henry deals explicitly with peacemaking strategies and the complexities of negotiating compensation throughout a conflict, and she walks us through some of the event analyzes provided by participants themselves. That is, she cites the explanations they give for paying certain parties, and not paying others, and for electing certain causes of the conflict while ignoring others.

It’s an excellent paper that rings true to me because I was living in Mt.Hagenwith one of the participant clans, the Penambe, at the time; I am familiar with some of the folks’ quotes; and I was a business partner to the person whose song lyrics form part of the title. Maggie Leahy Wilson’s plaintive song says: “There’s smoke in the hills / Gunfire in the valley / A woman is wailing / A loved one is killed / My heart is aching / My Heart is aching.” It’s about heartache, Henry reminds us, which always makes highlands violence regrettable, especially to women, even if we concede that it is integral to the warp and woof of highlands life. She goes on the demonstrate how, like it or not, peace compensation strategies during and after warfare are as important to the community as traditional exchange ceremonies. Along with Rumsey, Merlan, and M. Strathern, Henry argues that warfare is not a mark of social degeneration (sensu Hobbes) but a structural component of highlands society, even as it is bemoaned and avoided by most highlanders.

Alan Rumsey (Rumsey 1999), Francesca Merlan (Merlan and Rumsey 1991) and Marilyn Strathern (M. Strathern 1972) all have written about peace negotiations in the Western Highlands as highly social events, as layered and important as moka exchanges, funerary feasts and bride price ceremonies. But moka wealth exchange partners are never the same people you oppose in battle, so the relations defined there are very different. In battle, for example, direct and primary enemies never compensate each other; they compensate their allies and their minor enemies who may have lost lives and property. In some cases this seems counter-intuitive (to people like Diamond), but it is part of a strategy to ensure future alliances, and not to seal an absolute peace. Special transactions can secure longer-lasting peace, however, and help settle a matter more conclusively. These transactions require lengthy discussion, in which every trigger event, and then every secondary cause, is re-examined for latent significance and hidden motives. First the key causes are revealed to the communities and left to percolate in gossip for awhile, to accumulate variant recollections and memories of past causes. It’s what we call “planting the seed” in tok bokis or euphemistic tok pisin: a proposition is placed on the table for a while, and public conjecture accumulates around it. Finally, the best orators from all sides will reap the fruit of this and present it in a formal debate, literally redefining the terms of the fight as they do so. Their eloquence can weave insinuation into clever parables that may, if successful, satisfy all parties while leaving acceptable loopholes for the future. Consensus, and definitely not emotions, seals the conclusion of these peace negotiations. People like Daniel Wemp might walk away with one interpretation, and his enemy may take away another, but neither view shakes the tree of consensus.

In the Nebilyer fight, for example, one of the trigger events was a mistake. A Ganiga man shot dead his clansman, a security guard, after a theft on Joe Leahy’s coffee plantation. Initially, the Ganiga assumed a Kulka had shot the guard, and they retaliated against the Kulkas. But they actually chopped up a Kulka ally, a Poi Penambe man, and this elicited a fierce alliance between Kulkas and Poi Penambe. In turn, the Ganiga brought in the Ulka as their allies, re-activating a series of debts and obligations between these sometimes-allies. Ultimately, the internal compensations were labyrinthine: Ulkas paying each other, Ganigas paying Ulkas, Poi Penambe paying Kulkas, and Ulka Kundulge paying the Ganigas (because it turns out the man who shot the security guard was not Ganiga but Ulka Kundulge after all).

In the midst of all of this, Henry cites the Poi Penambe man who was chopped up by the Ganigas and survived. His complaint is clearly made in the hope of eliciting sympathy from the listener, fully aware that his problem is “unjust” at some level, but knowing that the social contract, and not his personal emotions, will prevail.

He said, "The Kulkas are putting the pressure on me and my tribe you see, because I was axed. I was axed and the fight started. Probably about 30 or 40 men were killed, Kulkas. And the pressure is on me now, May father and my small tribe, Poi Penambe, you know. They’ve been given pigs and money and all that thing, and they’re still putting pressure on us today…They want cash now. I have to initiate that by putting in a couple of grand, which I haven’t got. They [Kulka] sort of feel that because they [Ganiga (Ulka)] chopped you and we supported you and we lost our men in the fight and then you’re still alive, we should be compensated by you for our men (Henry 2005: 438)."

This is “restorative” justice, or what Alan Rumsey prefers to call transformative justice (Rumsey 2003) – and it has nothing to do with either personal or collective revenge. It is about finding a way forward, as painful as that may be. Indeed, I imagine the Poi Penambe man still harbors resentments from that period.

In addition (and this has to do with the Daniel Wemp case) these analyses are made all the more complicated by new factors of the cash economy: a cash crop income (coffee, in this case) and the resentments over whose land is used for cash crops, and the obvious jealousies of an emergent class system. Some people are vastly wealthy in the Western Highlandstoday, while others are modern peasants. Any substantive discussion of Wemp’s story, and his gloss of events,  must take these factors into consideration. Like the Western Highlands, the Southern Highlandscontext involves the segmentary politics of clans, and the new hierarchies of cash. 

Swallowing half-truths

The problem is that Papua New Guineans are more and more likely to describe warfare in ways that Europeans prefer to understand it.

When hostilities break out between two sides, the outsider is apt to regard the situation as arising de novo. And when Melanesians are asked today why given fights have occurred, they themselves are prone to give deceptively simple answers, to do with land-grabbing, for example, theft of pigs, rape or perhaps sorcery. Rarer reasons are known to have been voiced: such as women stealing, elopement, jilting a marriage suitor, threats to a trade specialty, or even insults directed at gardens by a visiting tribal leader. Perhaps the most common type of response, though still simplistic as it remains, is to give a narrative account, an informant telling how A was angered by the actions of B and led a raiding party to kill B or one of his associates (and did so in a way worth telling), the deeper or long-term reasons behind the act of revenge being barely touched. After years of interaction between “subject” and “ruling” peoples, these replies to outside researchers have taken on a stereotypical quality…[and] such replies have been absorbed into pre-existing explanatory frameworks to vulgarize the already dissolving subtleties and complexities of traditional perspectives. When it is blithely accepted, however, that Melanesians view human conflict in terms of disconnected, separate episodes, with acts that require revenge, followed by acts of vengeance (or satisfaction), supposedly forming a self-contained unit of affairs, only a half-truth has been swallowed. (emphasis added) (Ibid: 32)

Traditional justice in New Guineais not based on the Western model of retribution, but on that of restoration. Restorative justice is far from the eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth blood-lust Diamond attributes to Wemp and would wish for his father-in-law; it has more to do with repairing the social fabric. Restorative justice as the tribal dispute logic is also being increasingly formalized in PNG’s statutory law. In village courts it has always been the leading form of jurisprudence: Whatever custom makes the best peace is the best option. But even the greater legal apparatus of PNG has more and more customary law folded into it these days.

For women in particular, it continues to be a very unsatisfying form of peace. As traditional clanswomen were subject (rather like Sharia law) to their husband’s whims, and more likely to be thrown in as part of a compensation payment than avenged for injury, they are beginning to seek more equable status in the courts these days. None of this has been easy (see Garap 2000), and some of it has been remarkably successful in recent conflict resolution cases (see Rumsey 2000, 2003). But it continues to resist the Judeo-Christian concept of a bounded and autonomous individual before the courts – someone wholly responsible for his or her action – because that product of Western civilization simply does not exist in Melanesia.

Women are struggling with this across the developing world, and anyone familiar with non-Western worldviews would be able to appreciate the steeper uphill battle of feminism outside the Western world. Not long ago, for example, a young woman from the Southern Highlands of PNG, not far from Daniel Wemp’s home, took her own father to court to establish her jural individualism (and won): It was determined that she could stay at university in the capital and not, as her father and clan had determined, be part of a compensation package to an enemy clan.

Restorative justice

Let me try to explain restorative justice with a personal example from the Western Highlands. In 1993, I was kidnapped in Mt.Hagen(which is about 60 km from Nipa) by a gang of young men who were members of my hosts’ enemy clan. I was living with the Elti Penambe, and these were Kopi clansmen living just next to Penambe clan boundaries on Kuta Ridge, outside of Mt.Hagentown. The gang held up a car carrying me and two tourists on our way to town, as we passed through their customary land. We were really just caught up in traditional Penambe-Kopi tensions made more fraught by the nearby Nebilyer fight. Our kidnappers did not target us per se, but as accessories to the Penambe cause. The tourists were an Australian father and son visiting from Port Moresby, and I was a familiar Penambe resident at the time. In the course of the day we walked through the bush, were held at gun and knife point, and finally, after threat of a gang rape, fought the captors, after which I ran away and was molested by one of them

During the year of court proceedings that followed the incident, clansmen and friends did what they could to dissuade me from pursuing the case, not so much because they couldn’t understand my anger, but because they said it would jeopardize the inter-clan peace. How could I be so selfish? Even when the enemy tried to substitute one young man for the culprit (someone who could do the jail time because he wasn’t in school), I was (for some reason) dogged in my need for retribution. The kid who put a knife to my neck was going to be the kid who paid the price, I insisted.

As my clansmen hammered out their own precarious peace, including an exchange of pigs and money that never involved me, I went back and forth from the courthouse in town with sympathetic cops from the lowlands who openly despised Hagenpeople and made no bones about roughing up the young man in his cell.

Eventually, a public prosecutor helped me apply a new restorative justice law when the young man was convicted: In exchange for the detention time he had served, I would accept a collection of kina compensation from the clan. This new restorative clause seemed fair to me, because the kid had spent a year in detention anyway, and I was in fact angry at the clan for harboring the gang and not assisting us to bring it in.

By the time a conviction was made, I was thoroughly disgusted with my “host” clan as well as these neighbors, and entirely on the grounds of Western “fairness” I had deeply internalized. At one point, while still living in the village, we’d put out word that there was a reward for some of the cargo stolen from the tourists, in particular their video camera. When the gear came back, at the hands of one of the culprits himself, I snickered and told them I’d lied, there was no reward – and my hosts were furious with me for the deceit.

They had not been angry in my behalf at the lies we were continually told by the clan representatives (that they had no idea who these kids were and no notion of where they might be hiding). And they were not appeased in the least when we found the gang had left in the camera a home video that, when played, revealed the clan representative to be part of the gang and pledging, in local language, that the next time they kidnapped me they’d kill me after all.

During this period, as a bushfire in the enemy land grew out of control and threatened to cook our gardens, I was told to leave the clan land for fear, with the fire, of starting a renewed war. Joe Leahy (himself deeply embroiled in the Nebilyer fight) offered me safe haven in one of his town flats.

I distinctly remember two offenses I took very personally during this period, even as I knew better than to do so. At one point, the enemy clan leader was accompanied by a Peace Corps volunteer, a very nice young man working in the region, when he came to visit one night and plead for me to drop the case. I had by now seen him in a home video (and still keeping this fact secret), so when I grew impatient and accused him of lying, the Peace Corps volunteer quite disingenuously came to his defense, asking, “Don’t you think you’re being little culturally insensitive, Nancy?”

At another time, my business partner and host, with whom I had written several grant proposals for women’s projects, told me I was aggravating clan tensions and putting the poor accused lad’s family in great distress by not dropping the case. So much for female solidarity, I snarled.

Finally, when the young man was convicted and returned with the clan counselor on the designated day, with the agreed-upon fine, there was no one to receive him at court, and the two walked back to the village, never to be pursued again. I took churlish satisfaction to find the young man repeatedly re-offended afterwards, and was pleased to hear he was caught for robbery and thrown into jail sometime later.

But every time I passed the rest of the gang on the streets of Hagen, for years afterwards, they would wave and shout friendly hellos to me like we were old pals. And I’ll never forget one afternoon when I waited in the courthouse for our hearing and the young man was led past me in handcuffs. “Hey Nance, yu orait?” he said, or some such unaffected greeting. I stood there for a long time trying to understand how he could be so friendly, so impersonal about his arrest.

In the end, it was this depersonalization that got me through the ordeal, because every Hagenwoman I might have commiserated with preferred to say “Get over it,” and “What makes you special?” I was a cipher in a group war, and nothing, not even the assault, was a personal gesture. The fact that I was a woman only further diffused my “rights.”

It hit home one day, several months into the trial, when the lowlands policeman assigned to my case came to pick me up for the proceedings. He had the case file on the seat beside him, under his holstered gun, and I took a quick look out of curiosity. He was a nice guy; I liked him, even though he had been among those who relished bashing the kid when he was first picked up. (The most disturbing instance I saw came when they pulled him out of the cell, for my benefit, and stood him before a low desk, where they lay his penis and gave it several boot whacks – certainly not to be confused with an expression of feminist solidarity.) When I opened the case file I noticed that the charge against this kid was “theft,” and nowhere did it mention the attempted rape. “What?” I must have asked. The cop told me yeah, he’d forgotten, and they’d tack that on afterwards when they got a conviction.

Ultimately, I learned what the Poi Penambe man interviewed by Rosita Henry knew too well. I could cry forever about my personal wounds, but I’d evoke no sympathy until I worked for a larger social reparation.

Patterns of aggression

In conclusion, I would say that anthropologists are not the only elephants who remember past injuries. Conservationists and development workers in PNG have similar memories. In 1992, for example, World Wildlife Fund US, on whose board Diamond sits, sponsored an eco-forestry project in the Kikori Delta region of PNG. Chevron was then drilling for oil in the region and had become concerned about publicity surrounding its environmental effects, so they enlisted the help of the WWF to green up their image.

Internal Chevron documents at the time suggested that “WWF will act as a buffer for the joint venture against environmentally damaging activities in the region, and against international environmental criticism.” The eco-forestry project would be an alternative to the industrial logging made possible by laying Chevron’s oil pipeline, and would be additionally supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the U.S. State Department and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation.

The problem was, however, they did not source their timber from the logs felled by Chevron, but instead from a local company that was known to be harvesting mangrove forests. Unfortunately, harvesting mangroves is illegal in PNG, for conservation reasons. When the sawdust hit the fan, though, WWF US proved unrepentant. Apparently (in a remarkable foreshadowing of this debate) the state of Papua New Guineadid not mean much to the project sponsors.

As the Sydney Morning Herald reported, “Jared Diamond, a WWFUS board member and Pulitzer Prize winner … says that what is happening at Kikori is ‘sustainable logging of mangroves.’ Diamond adds that, regardless of whether it is illegal ‘if it can be done on a sustainable basis then by all means do it’" (Rowell 2001).

Enough said.

NANCY SULLIVAN:  Director, Nancy Sullivan and Associates, Ltd. does anthropological consulting, qualitative research, survey design, report writing, training and workshop design for a range of private and public entities. The field teams consist of DWU graduates from the Department of PNG Studies (former students of ethnographic research methods]. In 2009, she served as Team Leader, Karawari Cave Arts Expedition, The National Geographic Society Magazine, March 2-28, covering the cave art project National Sullivan & Associates have been conducting since 2007 with National Geographic and Guggenheim support.

REFERENCES:

Banks, C., 2000. "Contextualizing sexual violence: rape and carnal knowledge in Papua New
Guinea," in Reflections on Violence in Melanesia, ed. S. Dinnen and A. Ley, Annandale NSW: Hawkins Press, pp 83-104.

Barth, F. 1975. Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea,New Haven: YaleUniversityPress.

Berndt, R.M., 1962. Excess and Restraint. Chicago: Universityof ChicagoPress.

Doherty, T. and S. Garap, 1995. Women and customary law in PNG, Documents from the IWDA’s 1995 (pre-Beijing conference) Beneath Paradise Collections (unpublished).

Feil, D. 1987. The Evolution of Highland Papua New GuineaSocieties. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversityPress.

Frankel, S. 1986. The Huli Response to Illness. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.

Garap, S. 2000. "Struggles of Women and Girls—Simbu Province, Papua New Guinea," in Reflections on Violence in Melanesia, ed. S. Dinnen and A. Ley, Annandale, NSW: Hawkins Press, pp. 159-171.

Glasse, R.M. 1959. "Revenge and Redress among the Huli," Oceania5:273ff.
1968. The Huli of Papua: a cognatic descent system. Cahiers de l’homme NS, 8, Paris.

Goldman, L.R. 1981. "Compensation and Disputes in Huli," in R. Scaglion (ed), Homicide Compensation in Papua New Guinea. Law Reform Commission of PNG Monograph 1, Port Moresby, pp. 56ff.

Goddard, M. 1996. "The snake bone case: Law, custom, and justice in a Papua New Guineavillage court." Oceania.

Hallpike, C.R. 1977. Bloodshed and Vengeance in the PapuanMountains. Oxford: OxfordUniversityPress.

Henry, R. 2005. ‘Smoke in the Hills, Gunfire in the Valley’: War and Peace in Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea,Oceania75 (4): 431+.

Knauft, B.M. 1985. Good Company and Violence: sorcery and social action in a lowland New Guineasociety. Berkeley: Universityof CaliforniaPress.

-----1990. "Melanesian Warfare: a theoretical history," Oceania60(4): 250ff.

-----1999. From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesian Anthropology. Ann Arbor: Universityof MichiganPress.

Koch, K-F. 1974. War and Peace in Jalemo: The Management of Conflict in Highland New Guinea. Cambridge: HarvardUniversityPress.

Lederman, R. 1986. What Gifts Engender. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversityPress.

Meggitt, M.J. 1977. Blood is Their Argument. Explorations in World Anthropology. Palo Alto:StamfordUniversityPress.

Merlan, F. and A. Rumsey, 1991. Ku Want: Language and Segmentary Politics in the Western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversityPress.

Ploeg, A. 1969. "Government in Wanggulam." Verhandekingen van het Koninklijk Institut voor Taal-, Land –en Volkenkunde 57, The Hague

Rappaport, R.A. 1967. Pigs for the Ancestors. New Haven: Yale UniversityPress.

Reay, M. 1959. The Kuma. Melbourne:MelbourneUniversityPress.

Rowell, A. 2001. "No way to save trees." Sydney Morning Herald, 02/03/2001.

Rumsey, A. 1999. "Social segmentation, voting, and violence in Papua New Guinea." The Contemporary Pacific 11(2):305-333.

-----2000. "Women as peacemakers--A case from the NebilyerValley, Western Highlands,Papua New Guinea." In S. Dinnen and A. Ley (eds), Reflections on Violence in Melanesia. Leichhardt, NSW: The Federation Press, pp. 139-155.

-----2003. "Tribal Warfare and Transformative Justice in the New Guinea Highlands." In Sinclair Dinnen, Anita Jowett and Tess Newton (eds.) A Kind of Mending: Restorative Justice in the PacificIslands, Canberra: Pandanus Press, pp. 79-93.

Scaglion, R. 1979. "Formal and Informal Operations of a Village Courtin Maprik." Melanesian Law Journal 7(1): 116-29.

Schieffelin, E. L. 1976. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. New York: t. Martin’s Press.

Strathern, A. 1977. "Contemporary Warfare in the New Guinea Highlands: Breakdown or Revival?" Yagl-Ambu 4 (3): 135-46.

Strathern, M. 1972. Women in Between: Female Roles in a Male World: Mount Hagen, New Guinea. London: Seminar Press.

Trompf, G.W. 1994. Payback: The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversityPress.

Wedgewood, C.H. 1930. "Some Aspects of Warfare in Melanesia." Oceania1:1ff.

The Business Forum and the Chinese

Yesterday was the second day of the 25th Papua New Guinea Australia Business Forum, held here in Madang. The very last session of the day included a presentation by Dr Rona Nadile, the First Asst Secretary of the Dept of Labour and Industrial Relations, speaking about PNG's new work permit laws.  Lots of info on relaxed requirements for foreign workers, etc, and yet at one point she noted that there is a new language requirement to foreign work permits: they must be able to speak English, Tok Pisin or Hiri Motu, and be accredited as such by an independent agent. When I asked afterwards how it is that we have a major resource extraction project in Madang where most of its foreign workers speak no English and have abandoned English tutorials that were offered by Divine Word University, and considering that some of the violence sparked over the last week was said to have arisen from complaints that Chinese do not even speak English-----she was incredibly candid, to her credit. Before the entire forum, she explained that when these work permits came across her desk she was told that the PM's Department wanted her to 'make it happen' and issue all work permits for MCC employees. A collective gasp and giggle could be heard across the room.

 

At another point in the point in the Forum, I will just add, Richard Kassman made a statement couched in a question for two Australian environmental consultants who had just presented breathtakingly dense and naively optimistic power points on carbon trade initiatives (and the investment opportunities they represent). Richard was responding to the breezy way they had noted the 'mosaic of landowner agreements' that would have to be established within this vibrant economic environment, saying they were confident that Sir Michael was such a strong proponent of carbon trading, and the REDD strategy (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), that with such government backing, surely there would be few if any problems.(!)

 

Richard asked fort clarification (which didn't come) by stating that (more or less) 'You have no idea about

Papua New Guinea, and the fact that the timber industry runs the country now!' Scattered applause and murmurs all around, with Henry Kila and the rest of the Business Council stifling laughter, and someone in the peanut gallery behind me adding "RH and MCC run the country!"

 

Very good session I'd say. Surpassed only by drinks later when John Leahy of the Port Moresby Chamber of Commerce said to me---Hey, do you really think Somare would force the Chinese into anything for their work permits when they promise something like 1! billion kina worth of investment here? It's not like they're bozos, this is the Chinese government we’re talking about. 

 

Not bozos? I asked John. We both shook our heads. I reached for another slice of beautiful sashimi tuna, thanks to Pete Celso of RD Tuna and a small army of masked RD slicers and handlers, no doubt the easier option than (what they actually market) a hundred tins of low grade tuna swimming in oil or tomato sauce. 

 

Of course the absolute highlight of the Forum was Monday night's dinner speech by Sean Dorney, too hilarious to do justice to here, but comparing and contrasting the different kinds of deportation strategies deployed byFiji and PNG. One involves a hasty fraught trip to the airport, and the other a series of warning motions, and polite deferrals, before being invited back and awarded an MBE. 

Today's National newspaper:

Permit fiasco

*Rules ‘bent’ for mining project*

By BARNABAS ORERE PONDROS in Madang
CHINESE nationals employed by the Ramu nickel mine were issued work permits despite not meeting Papua New Guinea’s labour laws which stipulate that all non-citizens must be proficient in English.
Department of Labour and Industrial Relations acting executive manager for employment promotion Dr Rhonda Nadile revealed this yesterday at the 25th Australia-PNG Business Council forum in Madang.
She said despite strong opposition from the Department of Labour and Industrial Relations over the legality of the issue, the National Government directed the department to issue the permits “because the agreement has been signed to develop the Ramu nickel project”.
According to Dr Nadile, the National Government overlooked the labour laws because the Ramu nickel project was far more important.
Dr Nadile said “under Labour laws, all non-citizens must be proficient in English before being issued work permits”.
However, a special allowance was made for Chinese employees of the Ramu nickel project.
“I must be frank with you that we followed Government directives to issue the work permits,” she said when responding to questions raised by forum participants.
Dr Nadile said if the department tried to question or oppose the issuance of work permits, the applicants only go higher up, “even to the Prime Minister’s office”.
She explained that to address the language barrier between the Chinese and nationals, the National Government had signed an agreement for the Chinese to undertake English language studies at the Divine Word University.
However, sadly, this has not transpired.
The National Government is now in the process of signing another agreement to teach the Chinese employees how to speak English.
“Language is an important aspect in employment but, at this point, there are huge problems trying to solve this issue with the Chinese at the project,” she said.
Dr Nadile’s presentation at the forum was about Papua New Guinea’s new Labour and work permit laws.

 

 

 

 

This blog is killing me

I've spent more time trying to blog in the past few weeks than I've ever spent blogging before. Some combination of viruses and IT stupidity have combined to prevent me from updating anything at all, and this blog is no more than a test to see if I can somehow make it back.

Guess who came to dinner

More than two months have passed (almost three) since Ive written here, and it is certainly not for want of content. In that time Ive had the great good fortune to visit my sister in San Francisco, friends in LA, more in New York, then travel to Santiago and see a couple of friends before reaching Easter Island to see my great friends, the Riroroko family. From there, I came home through Lima, Madrid in a snowstorm, and a day in Amsterdam. I had such a great time, and spent so much time away from home, that my kids had almost forgotten me. But for the gifts in my bags. It was, as always, a long haul with overweight cargo, including (not least) the most fantastic Sesame Street talking Elmo doll in the world. Intended for Baby Nancy was immediately adopted by the entire family, most importantly Pauly, who is the only one of us able to meet it at eye level. Elmo talks, waves his hands, throws back his head, claps his split-melon mouth, and even bends to his knees, as he tells ditties in the exact same voice we know from TV. We  might bring him to the bush for long storytelling sessions around the fire.

Apparently there are  versions of this charming imp who have their batteries changed and hurl adult-rated threats  at their handlers. But not ours, fortunately. As yet.

 

Ah, the sweet surprises of global trade.

But the first highlight of my trip had to be the election of Obama in November, when I first arrived in the US Suddenly, as if overnight, the whole public demeanour of the States perked up. I felt and witnessed more optomism in public places than every before. 

In the midst of this, there was also  an interesting moment with two old friends. Leigh and Tom, a biracial couple, were married more than twenty years ago, and each, like myself, distinctly remember seeing Guess Whose Coming to Dinner? in their impressionable youth. We were watching it only days after the election, on the overstuffed sofa of their TV den, kitted out for their nearly-grown kids with games and CDs, when it came to the moment---the (for my money) most loaded moment of the film. Not when Katherine Hepburn turns out her associate for racist imputations. Not when Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier hammer out their mutual misperceptions into mutual respect (and Poitier leaves a dollar on his desk for using the phone). And certainly not when the dotty fiancée, Katharine Houghton, confides in Hepburn that she adores this man because he reminds her of her father. Yes, the film is steeped in condescending ‘revelations’ about how astonishingly middle class, how very understandable, this doctor is who wants to marry the pretty young white girl. But what makes the movie a classic is the parallel message of the doctor’s implicit superiority, on the basis of all the things the white liberal in-laws admire: he’s self-made, working for the poor, successful, sober and thoughtful. Indeed, he makes the white girl seem, well, frivolous. But that’s never explored. It is 1967 and all young white women in film are frivolous.

    

   

Instead, there is the marvelous moment when Poitier’s parents come to dinner, having just been punched in the gut about their daughter in law being white, and Beah Richard’s, as the mother, takes her son aside on the verandah and asks the central question (not actually expressed by the white parents, but one I remember being raised by my own grandmother while we watched the film). What about the children? Who will they be? Poitier responds dreamily, or improbably, that his fiancée actually believes--crazy kid-- their child could be President of the United States someday. (Tom, Leigh and I turn to look at each other.) For his part, he continues, he’d be happy if they were Secretary of State. (Gasp).

Freddy

Freddy Kasi  (1976-2009)

    

We grieve for the sudden loss of our friend and colleague Freddy Kasi, who passed 11 January from an unknown illness. He was drinking homebrew or steam in the village, started to throw up, threw up the whole next day, and just died. What a horrible waste. He is survived by his wife Ruth, herself with a baby on the way, and two young kids, one boy and one girl. We on the Karawari cave arts team (not to mention everyone in Yimas, his home) will miss his smile, his good nature, and his warmth and intelligence. These are empty words, I know, but I can only fill them with memories of his laughing face as he helped with cooking, with packing the team gear, and always, always, climbing the most extreme heights or treacherous paths to reach the caves. (This shot below was designed by Freddy himself---taken by a team member). He had best friends amongst the Meakambut, the Imboin, the Awim and all along the Arafundi, and with the Chileans, Spanish, Canadian and Easter Island scientists who visited the sites. But no foreigner was more fond of him than my LA friend David Read, who returned to Madang and bought him a camera, as a thank you for hours and hours of companionship and fun. In October I returned with Freddy to the caves and he used that little camera to record some of our best and only video of the Meakambut, as well as some silly footage of us dancing like idiots to the radio. Freddy was bright, and had enormous potential. We could only have hoped to help him fulfill some of it. He loved his wife and kids, and instantly volunteered to look after a kid I adopted from Awim Villagethe neglected Donald, without any expectations of returns. Sadly there’s a third child on the way for him that he will never know, who will never know this charming and promising man just beginning what would have always been an interesting and thoughtful life. Goodbye good friend, we miss you already.

Koline

Koline Anton (1980-2008)

 

Koline was a beautiful young woman from Ambonwari Village on the Konmei River, married to my son Jeffrey Anton. In 2000 they fell in love at a party in Konmei. I was back in the US having chemo, and had sent my Yimas sons home for the time being---possibly forever, we thought. Jeffrey met the lovely Koline, who had been raised by another anthropologist, Borut Telban; they fell in love; he promised to return for her when he’d built her a house in Yimas. A few months later he did, and they remained in love and happy to the day she died in early December 2008. Three beautiful kids now miss their Mum: Melissa, Andrew, and baby Claudia. We are all gutted. She’d gone home for a visit, fell sick one day and was gone by the next. Samting blong ples.

The PMV life

Last weekend, Sunday to be exact, day of rest, I came back from Hagen on a PMV to Madang. There is no longer a direct flight between the towns, so, short of paying enrmous amounts to fly home, I found a PMV. It came recommended by someone working at the Highlander Hoel, and arrived here to pick me up at 7.30 AM, a very good sign.  Friendly driver and offsider wantoks greeted me and explained they were off to Madang on a betelnut run. We trolled the town for passengers, but spent most of the next hour or so at the main bus stop outside the market where every kind of charmless cinderblock ugliness passes for development.

Kids are actually homeless now in Hagen, and alot of then hang out at the bus stop, hustling for toea, or for nothing. They cling to uncles and brothers who sell stolen biros and single smokes and stolen rucksacks as they walk through the deisel fumes between buses. vendors selling buai and smokes from broken ironing boards, men who gulp all the smoke before inhaling. Hands in pockets, hats resting on he top of the head. Bowl cuts, shaved heads, cornrolls, dreads, spit and market trash and buai everywhere. Big football sized bare feet maneuvering emounds of cucumber and pawpaw rinds and wopa bisket wrappers.  

I remember a morning in the New Delhi bus station over twenty years ago that exuded deep human despair to me then, and this is only marginally more cheerful on a Sunday morning, especially as I considered the ten to twelve hours ahead of me. Hideous colours for laplaps here, I have no idea why; vomit and army green and mauve with touches of orange. Ochre and umber and black and greeny yellow. Colours not to be worn on a full stomach, paired with acrylic jumpers in overripe blues and reds, for women in cornrolls, with fendi bags and transgender allure, brows tweezed to a rapidograph line, spitting orange streams from great muzzles of buai.  Bob Marley and Tupak still the Krishna and Shiva of PNG t shirt culture. Jackets hanging by their hoods, thermal vests, babies in bilums and draped with clean new light blue blankets. Barets and ropes of leathery folds on the men's faces, neckless bears of mean with broken sneakers, 6 pocket shorts, rugby shirts, baseball caps and hooded anoraks. Kids with skeletal baseball caps and no shoes. Dirty trousers under Sunday meri blouses, with cardigans and long woolen kilts. I also remember crying once, as a preteen, when my mother refused to buy me a similarly hideous terrycloth pantsuit with yellow horizontal stripes (she was a wise woman, or a kind one, or just appropriately ashamed), and now I know where that outfit found its destiny, if only in spirit. Here and there a breathakingly beautiful young woman with a baby, or a boyfriend, like flame of the forest in the midst of deep greens.  All the overhead powerlines  hanging running shoes like temple offerings, to the god we always, for some reason, assume to be  atheletic.

Two hours later, after the usual waltz from bus sop to bus stop calling out GorokaKundiawaRamuMadangRamuWararaisMagangMadangMadang! for takers, jockeying with other better looking vehicles (many of whom did have a rear window and not a panel of duct tape), we pulled out of town. Considering the speed with which we took off, and the way my stomach lurched wih the tippy wheel base, I felt sure Id be home by dusk, in time for dinner with the kids. Of course I had determined not to eat or drink myself, as a female pee is very near impossible on most of these trips, but I did have a few oranges and bananas from the highlander breakfast buffet table, plus a few Hubba Bubba to fight the fur balls in my mouth. Very soon, though, I learned that this was to be a very long excursion, a holiday vyage for our Hagen passengers, all of whom but one (the bus owner's Dad) were under 35 and ready to party. Fortunately for them this can now be easily accommodated all across the highlands highway in clustering bus stops and way stations that have become semi-permanent settlements and beer halls with billaird tables, darts for SP games, kai bars and markets, even discos, every few miles between Hagen and the Ramu Valley.

 

Round about 10 Am the driver stopped off to top up fuel and have his first (?) SP behind the roadside stall, while everyone else stumbled out for a piss and a smoke and a 'paintim maus' with buai.. As the only woman, I crossed my legs and waited to set off again. As the morning grew older, the passengers grew friendlier and were accommodating enough to stop for me when I said I wanted tomatoes, then later when they knew I could find a good bush to piss. It was a pleasant enough tavern on wheels, as eventually everyone (all 14 of them) had six packs at their feet from winning darts, and were tempering their spak with sausage rolls and fried bananas along route.

 

This also made for alot of interruptions, as one by one, in no particular order, they would order the bus to halt for a pee. Everyone piles out for a smoke, a game of darts again, maybe a go at the billard table where two seven or eight year old kids are skillfully handling enormous pool cues. There are plenty of women around at these stops, and at Sisi Creek (Young Creek) in Morobe, just before the mountains flatten out to the Markham plains, the daytime atmosphere is almost healthy, with market stalls and good cheer, but I know from experience the night gets rough, with a disco and girls dancing aimlessly under one flouro bulb outside a main shack, SPs in hand, waiting for men to pull them into the urine-drenched grass behind. But this is the big pow wow of pit stops because all vehicles coming and ging from the highlands are compelled to stop at the once lovely elbow in the road, where a creek runs below the highway, to form convoys for the route west, or break tension from speeding through the Kompri Valley and miraculously not being held up this time, or fleeced by the police who have forgotten to prevent hold ups. This was where, after all my fellow passangers got over the fact that 'mi ambuge blong bifo yet' I pulled out my cd player and put on the Best of Bowie (for some reason) to pretend to be alseep.

 

Three PM passed, then 4 PM, then five oclock and the skies grew tinged with grey. A short rainfall, and then a downpour as we travelled through Markham like a bullet through dense fabric. The pouding noise on the bus and the cumulative effect of SP made everyone groggy and sedated, ad eventually the entire cab were singing in harmony--singing long dolorous Hagen songs in Melpa, then funny pop songs in Pidgin, then chant-like songs in rounds, which individuals added onto by inventing the next verse. I took off my earphone and slumped to the glass on the right side of the bus, just behind the driver, and truly relaxed. It was like a concert, or like being in the midst of a great compensation payment without threat from the enemy: just rythmic full-throated song, with the occasional semi-spak explanation to the Missus that this is how we pass the time and keep the driver from falling asleep. Despite all the smoke haze and the burp-farting jokiness, I loved this collegiality, and began to remember what Hagen used to be like for me in the good times. 

Eventually the song would die down, someone would tell another stupid joke, they would fall into the mechanical humm of rain and engine and a big darkness outside, and then someone would start the song again, with a new verse.  It was now the last leg and we were through the Gogol and on to Madang town. I was happy and sleepy and anxious to get home to my own toilet after 12 hours of lumpy seats. 

It must have been Amele, just passed Umuin, when the rock came.

 

It was dark and all I felt was shattering pellots of window glass all over my face and front, as my fellow passengers barked. It took a few second but I realised this explosion had been a rock and it barely missed my nose in a trajectory right across the sea and out through the opposite window. Such propulsion, it was impressive, and then very scary a I realised I was not hurt, had no blook anywhere, but had almost, by a hair's breath, been beammed, maybe killed.  The bus drove on a bit before stopping and everyone realized the windows were shattered, the owner's father crying already about how this was a brand new bus (!), why did they do this, and people scrambling out, stompung the dark road, as we rawled ahead to where another PMV had stopped after passing us. 

 It looks bad, and my drunken co-riders are shouting, searching the seats for their bushknives and the roadside for heavy stones. I get out shaking my head and clothes, pleading for us to go on please and not to start a fight, to go to the police and send them back and all that. But no one listens. The engine is cut and all the riders are cross the culvert to the trees and behind, where I can hear screams rom the village, people yelping and barking and obviously arming themselves for a good fight. Please let's go! I say to one man on the road with me, and he says very commandingly that nothing will happen, I will not be hurt, they will just have a talk. Righto. A Talk.

 

 Suddenly everyone's running back to the bus as more stones are thrown and several men are lumbering under the burden of one man who is hurt. I duck down as if to disappear in my seat and then the door slides shut and we're off under the bellows and cries of the men. One of them is lying on the floor covered in blood and I realise he's had a big canned spam size chunk of his upper arm taken off and blood spilling from a cut on his head. The bus is speeding now across Gum Bridge and everyone's arguing about whether to go to the police or the emergency ward first, and we drive into the emergency ward within minutes, where I stumble out with everyone, shaken, as they lift the bloodied man onto a stretcher and into the ward. Hageners are crying, nurses are crowding around, and I find my mobile hone to call Jacob for a pick up, realizing only just now how lucky I am to be here, to be home, to be sober and not from Hagen.

The mighty mighty Meakambut

Welcome to the rest of us, Meakambut.  

Semi-nomadic fringe highlanders in the foothills of the Central Range, behind Enga in the headwaters of the Arafundi River of the Karawari Region (East Sepik), the Meakambut are one of the last hold outs to the larger region, province, country and world. Our cave arts project has put us in contact with them, as guardians of some of the most important caves, and recently I spent alittle over a week with staff visiting one of their camps in the deep bush. Took us two days to get there, and those who came out to meet and greet us nearer the river really flew thrugh the bush like they were moving through a walking mall---picking food from the trees, collecting mushrooms, leaves, carrying kids and babies and our gear, along with their bows and arrows, in a picture of staggering cooperaion and agility.  I can't forget Pasu, the 95-lb man who took our Honda generator in a laplap across his back (what would that be--25 pounds?), then threw his nephew over his shoulders and bounded forward with a spring in his step. At one point we were all negotiating a log bridge up a steep slope when he remembered to turn back and reach for my hand--to pull me up over a bad patch. Astonishing, and nonchalant. I'm just back home now and will write more later, but this was a wonderful, exhilarating experience. We came with bush knives, salt, bits and pieces of gear they'll need to make gardens now, which is what they want to do. And some of my team from Yimas village, handed them their own clothes, and a load of donated secondhand shorts and t shirts and even underpants (go figger) from Yimas 2, which the Meakambut are all wearing with great pride now. Indeed, Pasu my hero now sports a tattered pair of ladies pink knickers under his as tanget, and looks pretty good for them. It's very hippie-chic.

     

Rum, sodomy and the lash: now Im depressed

I declare it to be insalubrious Saturday. After Black Tuesday, Maundy Thursday, Bleak Friday and all the other crisis days of the last week.

 

It is all very abstract for us in PNG, this news of banks crashing, credit tumbling, the low confidence market.    Here we live in the 16th hardest country to do business (according to the World Bank).  Although I suspect the reverberated impact on the Asian economies will sideswipe us eventually, leaving us with thousands of underpaid nickel mine workers, Im tempted to ask: How hard can it really get? We already have endemic corruption, the none too hidden costs of security and compensation, and a 30% business tax. Production is artisinal, and if it weren't for tropical rainforest, we could say our standard of living is high dust bowl.       So how will it hurt? For now Nero still fiddles on our island paradise, where a peck of streetcorner apples will always be is more prized than a spa weekend. 

  

So we might glean wisdom from the resilient and indefatigable third world, where no one builds skyscrapers so there’s nothing to jump from, and all the best homes are made of thatch and newspaper. Poverty? It comes natural. Coffee tin teapots, overloaded jalopies, lsouplines, breadlines and car tyre sandals--welcome to Beginner’s PNG. (Come onna my house).    If your secondhand spandex can find a final destination in the Highlands, then I believe the  abstemious gestalt of the anti-glamor thirties may have its classical roots in the semi-cash-economies of the developing world---especially PNG’s. (Somewhere in these shots we see the corpulicious Lucien Frued recently purchased by Russian gazillionaire, Roman Abromovich, which seems to be resting up for a market roller coaster in her near future---back to Sotheby's babe). Meanwhile, we too, need to sell our precious posessions by the curb. So I raise my headdress to those heroic hobos and the waifish Dorothea Lange models who made the Depression so gritty, so real, so distressed and J Crew--after all those roaring and gluttinous twenties.  They did for the midwest what Malinowski, FE Williams and Franck Hurley did for Papua. They made it pretty.     They gave us chic, and took away the tacky. Hitler was still in art school, Edward VIII hadn’t met Wallis, Errol Flynn was elbow-deep in his Wau-Bulolo claim, Fanny and Freddy Mae wore bib-overalls, and   New Guinea was experiencing its haute colonial moment!. Those were the days. Back when everyone wore their lunch on their head.   The real fundamentals of fashion can never be lost though. They're just temporarily sidelined. When fun was fun, and minimal was everything. When kids rolled tyre rims with a stick, and everything was a shade of gray: sepia, charcoal, steel, carbon, ashe, pearl, off-white.   No more McMansions, no more private planes; welcome to the new austerity –the less is more world down here below the poverty line---where Jeffrey Sachs is our party planner and Bono, Bob Geldof and Brangelina mingle with the noblest of savages.      

In a Depression-era revival, the Madang Club recently celebrated its youthful 60^th,   which most every louche lotus-eater on the north coast deigned to attend.The theme was being and feeling sixty.    All the very worst were photographed for their folly. Except for Rose Mamoa, who never takes a bad photo. And of course Roger.   You know how they say the Pogues is Irish music thrown down the cellar stairs? Rum sodomy and the lash and all?        Well this party was good times thrown off the front verandah. And it is every single attendee's own blinking fault for showing up in the first place. It would appear, from these photos, that the local Dame and the town mortician arrived in identical orange frocks! Doppelgangers.    When I finally clean the tracks up from BJ Kramer and Dr Mack’s inimitable (respective) Amy Winehouse and Nina Simone impersonations,   we may have a You-Tube music video out of it. I’ll keep you posted.

 

So get out your bib overalls, we're in for a new era. Goodbye free market fundamentalism , hello kuckle-down self-reliance. Did the unbridled markets ever really reward the 'winners' and punish the 'losers' anyway? Or just ratchet up global inequality? I think you know the answer to that. Luddites unite!

Happy Independence Day

Working on the Christmas card

  First, there's Madonna and Mom

  

and the outtakes.

 

Madonna and child ( Gospel according to Mums)


 

Rod turns eighteen, we turn ugly (speaking for myself of course)

The cake ...blurred in tranport

   

Rod the birthday boy

             

Gorgeous Gina

 

  

Wendy the friendly dragon

  

Brave in the face of his first dill pickle    

Big daddy

Sparky is down             \       

Never leftovers

   

    

Betelnut as a beauty product

 

 

 

 

Wiggy Denzel